Stan Brakhage and The Way to Shadow Garden (1954)

"How many colors are there in a field of grass

to the crawling baby unaware of green"

- Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in the 20th century experimental film.
He was born in a home for unwed pregnant women in Missouri, and was adopted to the name of James Stanley Brakhage.

During his childhood years Brakhage featured as a boy soprano on radio. During high school in Denver, Colorado he met filmmaker Larry Jordan and the musicians Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. Together they formed a drama group called The Gadflies.
Brakhage briefly attended Dartmouth College on a scholarship, but dropped out during his freshman year to make film.
He later became a distinguished professor of film studies at the University of Colorado.



Brakhage made film during no less than five decades, experimenting with different techniques: handheld camerawork, painting directly on to celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film and the use of double exposures. (Wikipedia)

You see, I'm a young player in the game and, at this stage, almost all my movements and reactions are instinctive and geared towards finding something out rather than stating something already discovered. In this context, all my films (and poems) are experimental. Naturally, some of the experiments blow up in my face; but in the creative mind, unlike the scientific laboratory, the explosions are not deadly.

From a letter to a distributor, 1954

During the years Brakhage came to do nearly 380 films, lasting from nine seconds to four hours. His films often treated the subjects of life, mortality, sexuality and innocence.

Brakhage died 2003 from bladder cancer.

The Way to Shadow Garden

The Way to Shadow Garden
Director: Stan Brakhage
USA 1954
11 min


This experimental short contains a young man returning to his apartment, only to realize that something is very wrong. Objects seem to move by themselves, but only seing it in the corner of his eye he's not sure whether he is crazy or not.
The paranoia digs deeper. Is there something under the blanket? Did I put my glass there? He takes a cigarette and picks up a book, tries to calm down. But he can't avoid it.
When the craze becomes too much, he pokes his eyes out and escapes into something that looks like a garden of shadows (the way to get to Shadow Garden, huh?), expressed with inverted colours.



The film is made with no dialogue or music. The only thing besides the moving picture is a strange, scratchy sound. Sometimes it sounds like someone walking on gravel, sometimes it sounds like the wind or a tea kettle. Sometimes the sound pulsates, sometimes it is lengthy, sometimes it is just quiet.

When I read about The Way to Shadow Garden I often stumbled over the words "psycho-sexual awakening". I don't know, to me it seems to portrait a guy becoming paranoid and mentally fucked up.
Anyway, what ever way you choose to interpret the film, I like it. It's like a dream sequence (or perhaps a nightmare?), eerie and beautiful at the same time.

Soap Opera (1964)

Soap Opera (The Lester Persky Story)
Director: Andy Warhol
USA 1964
47 min


There isn't very much imformation about this Warhol short. It is a silent (!) soap opera. cut into pieces by commercial segments (with sound). The technique is on purpose very simple and even really bad. White dots appear on the screen to and fro, the sound is scratchy, the picture is not always in focus and sometimes the grayscale is too dark or too bright. Very artistic, in a weird way. The Andy Warhol way.
All trivia I know about this little film is that it is the first film that Baby Jane Holzer did for Andy Warhol, and that the title "The Lester Persky Story" is taken from the producer Lester Persky, from whom Warhol used the 1950's commercials.

I don't know whether you're supposed to understand Andy Warhol's art or not, but I definitively don't. I like his work, though. And still, you can always have an idea of what this film tries to say. For example:
By mixing the soap opera with commercials, is Warhol trying to imitate television?
Does he try to say that they have the same meaning, that soap operas and commercials have as much content as the other?
And why is the soap opera silent, but the commercial isn't?
Is the dialogue that unimportant in a soap opera, that you simply can do without it?
Or does he want to say that baboons are aliens in disguise?

What ever the real intention was, Soap Opera is an entertaining and confusing experimental short film. It begins with a TV chef selling a home grill that you simply must own. And for only $ 4.95!




Two men, sitting next to each other. Smoking. The first man looks at the other man, then looks away. Right after that, the other man turns and takes a look on the first man. After a while, their eyes meet each other. They both look away.

Eight... seven... six... five... four... three...

... crazy woman! But her hair is just perfect, even after seven days of rain and storm! You only have to do your hair ones, and it will last soft and curly for seven days! (For some reason this commercial is shown twice.)

Baby Jane Holzer speaking on the phone.

Do you want to avoid stinking armpits? Use Secret and feel fresh and dry all day long!



Jerry Lewis, shooting a child in a commercial for his charity fund-raising for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA).



A hairy man, lying in his bed, smoking and talking on the telephone. Perhaps with Baby Jane Holzer...?



From a headless man groping himself on the dancefloor, to an innocent child eating a very easily done birthday cake.




Baby Jane Holzer tries desperately to receive some love from her boyfriend, but he seems to be more interested in a newspaper article about Frank Sinatra. (He might also have gotten an appetite for the brunette he so violently made love with earlier. See the first photo.)



The Wondascope! A fantastic invention - A powerful microscope, a long distance telescope, binoculars and pharingoscope, all in one!
You can inspect the quality of diamonds and stamps! You can watch the stars and read the newspaper a little closer! And if you've got something in your eyes - just use the pharingoscope! You can easily carry it in your pocket, wherever you go!
And the best thing? This little thingy you just can't live without only costs $ 2.49!

Soap Opera ends with a naked girl dancing in front of a mirror. The quality of the film in this section is, obviously on purpose, very pale and grainy.
The last seconds of the film shows a very surprised and shocked man, witnessing the beautiful and exciting scene.

Who By Water (2007)

“Ship passengers are depicted staring wordlessly into the camera’s lens. All of their numbers have by now been called. And in staring back at them, we contemplate our own fate.”
Bill Morrison

Who By Water
Director: Bill Morrison.
Music: Michael Gordon.
USA 2007
17 min

Bill Morrison (b. 1965) is an interesting american director and artist. He is most famous for his experimental collage film Decasia (2002), where he, as in Who By Water, has put together pieces of decaying nitrate silent film.




The title Who By Water is taken from the traditional Rosh Hashanah passage:

[...] who will live and who will die;
who will die at his predestined time and who before his time;
who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast,
who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm,
who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning.
Who will rest and who will wander,
who will live in harmony and who will be harried,
who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer,
who will be impoverished and who will be enriched,
who will be degraded and who will be exalted. [...]

“Bill Morrison’s films are as much celebrations of the sometimes-frightening beauty of decomposing film as laments for vanishing relics of cinema’s origin.”
Senses of Cinema