God's Vision: The Last Films of Stan Brakhage

The most famous Christian view of photography and cinema is Andre Bazin's 1946 essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in which the great Catholic critic compares the reproduction of physical reality via photography to the relic of the Shroud of Turin. For Bazin, photographic representation is a holy transcription (or transubstantiation) of the material world into emulsion. Photographic representation has the same direct connection to reality as the Shroud does to the dead body of Jesus.

Setting aside contemporary speculation (to me quite convincing) that the Shroud actually is a photograph, perhaps the first photograph, it seems difficult to use this Christian definition of photography for a filmmaker who has mostly rejected photographic representation as a direct transcription of our physical surroundings. The filmmaker in question is one of the greatest artists of our time, Stan Brakhage, the ultra-prolific avant-garde visionary who died last month at 70. The difficulty of using any Christian definition of cinema in regard to his work seems even more strained when talking about Brakhage's non-photographic films, which dominated the last 20 years of his career. Painting directly onto film stock with dyes, most of Brakhage's late works are rapidly moving abstract expressionist paintings on film, far from the Bazinian holy mimesis of photographic reproduction and representation.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to talk about Brakhage's final works without reference to Christianity. Last weekend, Anthology presented a memorial program of his last films (although apparently at least two more remain unseen): The Jesus Trilogy and Coda, Ascension, Resurrectus Est, Panels for the Walls of Heaven, and a brief photographic portrait of Brakhage's cat, Max. In a videotaped introduction, Brakhage described the great influence of the Christian tradition on his thought and related the weight of its influence on these self-conscious last testaments.

Panels for the Walls of Heaven is by far the best of the films screened. While it does not at first seem to be one of Brakhage's total masterworks, it ranks with his best hand-painted work. Brakhage views the film as a continuation of the photographic trilogy of A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea, The Mammals of Victoria, and The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him, but for this viewer the connections are minimal. Instead, the film most clearly seems to be Brakhage's second attempt to capture, if not heaven itself, then the idea of heaven in the final segment of his The Dante Quartet, "Existence is Song." Unlike that segment, Panels seems to be less an imagining of heaven than a furious dying vision of imagining what a heaven could be.

At 35 minutes, Panels is one of the longest of Brakhage's hand-painted films; it is impossible to do justice to its incredibly dense imagery here. Part of Brakhage's description of the film hints at the impossible visual richness of many of the film's sequences: "Red, blue and yellow course through in an up-down motion, then blues and yellows enter from left and right, in a complex medley on not solidly formed, but very vibrant, pulsations of color, at times only slightly hinting at a solidity of 'wallness' upon which the paint might exist. But it is a 'wall' suffused with light. Suggestions of fire and water, textures of paint on wall, sparkling jewels, and chunks of blue-white ice arise, as the textures of paint at times become a riotous rainbow of tumbling hues flowing in a river of light, creating the paradoxical experience of a fully substantial insubstantiality."

Brakhage's words here suggest the spectacular nature of his achievement. If normal photographic cinema is a Plato's cave for the material world, Brakhage has created a cave in which his abstract forms the shifting shadows for heaven itself, painted on the walls of his filmstock.

The Christian metaphysics of all the films gave the memorial service an air of perseverance, since Brakhage died of cancer he believed to have been caused by the coal-tar dyes he used to hand paint his late films. Although he switched to non-toxic dyes a half decade ago (before he made these films) it is painful to watch the very physical Jesus Trilogy and Coda without thinking of Brakhage's decaying body. The act of projection gives these painstakingly painted and step-printed films a resurrection in light, but the labor and anguish of the body is all too evident even with the rapid succession of images.

Last spring in Rome, I accidentally took a wrong turn on the way to the Sistine Chapel, ending up in the 20th-century religious art wing of the Vatican. I was hopeful that some of the works might be good, but I was not impressed. However, Brakhage has left us with the hope that great metaphysical and religious art are still possible.