Experiments With the Film Experience

His name is synonymous with underground filmmaking. But when Stan Brakhage came along in the 1950s, he sought out two giants of 20th century music as his artistic mentors: composers John Cage and Edgard Varese, the father of electronic music.

“I came to New York to meet them because I already had set film to a score by each of them,” he recalled. “Cage accepted the piece and Varese did not. But both took me on as a student because they were intrigued by the relationship between music and film.”

They taught him privately, although he “had no money to pay them and didn’t intend to become a composer,” Brakhage said. “And they didn’t just feed my mind. They fed my body--literally. They cooked.”

The 63-year-old, Missouri-born filmmaker was speaking recently by telephone from a New York hotel room. Earlier that evening at the Whitney Museum he had introduced a screening of films by another underground filmmaker and was to fly home shortly to Boulder, Colo., where he is a professor of film at the University of Colorado.

Brakhage talked expansively about the current state of experimental filmmaking, his aesthetic theories and, not incidentally, “Spirit Stream Storm”--a Filmforum program of 16 short films (seven by him)--that is playing this weekend at the Nuart Theatre in West L.A.

“The idea was to present a wide diversity of filmmaking that shared a common aesthetic,” he said. “Many of the films in the program are either hand-painted or use individual frames [for their kinetic effect]. I’m now almost totally devoted to painting on film.”

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The roughly two-hour show has been touring the country, stopping mostly at museums, film schools and festivals, and is on its way to Europe. The material was organized by Brakhage (pronounced BRACK-idge) and Bruce Posner, 42, a former assistant curator at the Harvard Film Archive. Selections include films from Spain, France, Russia and Austria. The shortest runs eight seconds, the longest 29 minutes.

Coincidentally, some of Brakhage’s underground work is also out on a new Voyager CD-ROM, “The Beat Experience,” with painting by Jackson Pollock, writing by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and jazz by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

When Brakhage first began painting on 16-millimeter film stock--during the early 1960s in his mythopoeic “Dog Star Man”--he wanted “to represent every kind of human seeing,” he said. “That meant I had to include day dreams and night dreams and what’s called hypnagogic, or close-eyed, vision.

“That’s simply nervous-system feedback through the optic nerves. Most children play with it. They rub their eyes. A lot of adults lose at least some consciousness of it. But it’s an activity--rub your eyes or not--it goes on all the time because the optic nerves are always feeding it back.”

Today a 35-mm print of “Dog Star Man” is the only feature-length experimental film among the 140 motion pictures in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. (Only partially hand-painted, it consists largely of superimposed, photographic images.)

“Film can exteriorize moving visual thinking,” he said. “We never really had a way to do that before 1895, the first date of motion-picture projection. That to me is comparable to the moment when someone, maybe an ape ancestor, beat on his or her chest to exteriorize the beating of the heart--and then beat on a log to broadcast it. It’s like the birth of music.”

Of all the arts, film is closest to music, Brakhage maintains, “because both are continuity arts across a period of time. They’re very dependent on rhythm, tempo, tone. Silent film particularly shares a great deal with music: It is a visual corollary to what the ears hear.”

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For that reason, paradoxically, Brakhage has virtually sworn off making sound films, though he has collaborated with some composers over the years. What benefit, then, were his famous mentors?

“I learned great humanitarianism from both men,” he said. “Varese also taught me the relationship between organized sounds and how the ears hear and organized imagery and how the eyes receive.

“From Cage I learned that each instant of music, in my case film, has its own full life. He always taught--maybe the best phrase is--an equality of experience.”

Brakhage considers conventional storytelling a legitimate function of film, but he abhors what Hollywood has done to define the moviegoing experience. It has shut out popular consideration of almost any non-narrative motion picture, he says.

“I and my very beleaguered, often ignored and maligned colleagues have worked in a truly independent tradition. We feel different from those who have knuckled under and let their works go through committees and bankers and so forth.

“Even in the Renaissance that sort of thing was problematic. What made the Renaissance great was Michelangelo when he defied the pope and sloshed paint over his mural and said he had to do all of it alone, without apprentices.

“Michelangelo went up and painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling by himself. That’s the Renaissance I respect, not everybody pandering to committees for commissions.”

Brakhage likens Hollywood filmmakers to corporate architects: “There are those who think that unless you have many millions of dollars, or are headed in that direction, you cannot make a significant thing and that truly independent filmmakers are just building shacks, however interesting.

“Whether we’re making art or whether film itself is an art, the future will determine,” he added. “That probably will take a couple of hundred years. I don’t even know if film will last that long.”

* “Spirit Stream Storm” has two showings, today-Sunday at noon, at the Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 478-6379.