Search found 1 match: Stan Brakhage

Next comes Untitled No. 6 of the Short Films of 1975 and I thought this might move him because it's based on a Mandelstam poem. The poem was my source of inspiration. In the film you see light moving slowly over different household objects and the rabbit's eye and the chicken with the bloodied wing and all these are in a stretch of purely metaphorical combinations. But that threw him into an even greater rage. Now he's yelling! He's standing up in his chair, he's sitting down, he's looking at the film out of the periphery of his eye as he's yelling things at Zanussi, and he won't look at me at all. My shoulder's up against him but he doesn't look at me and he's about the level of my navel.

In the mean time, Jane and his wife are laughing and they're holding hands, and smiling, like "isn't this a wonderful cock fight!" Because I must say I gave for everything I got. I ran through my whole repertoire of any kind of answer I'd ever given in the briefest and simplest way I've ever done. I've had twenty-five years of practice in being beat up in public. At one point he lashed out in a diatribe against innovation itself, which I haven't heard before and maybe the only place you could hear it from would be Russia. The Avant-Garde crowds I've played to never thought of that one.

I said, "What do you think Cézanne would say to that?" To which the answer came back, "I'm sure Mr. Brakhage knows perfectly well what Cézanne would say to that. However what I say is, innovation is reckless and destructive."

I can laugh now but my heart was absolutely breaking for the films. At that point I was feeling that I had rather it had not occurred at all, than these films running against this absurd wallpaper, with all these angry aesthetics...

But still, I'm not giving up. The next film was going to be Arabic 3. I remember saying, wait a minute, just like I had after Window Water Baby Moving, I have some pure music coming. Because he's arguing, this isn't music, it has symbols, things that are nameable. It was a very intelligent argument, maybe one of the most intelligent I've ever had, but it's totally dedicated to destroying the possibility of my kind of films.