Stan Brakhage - Anticipation of the Night (1958)

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Stan Brakhage

Anticipation of the Night (1958)








Stan.Brakhage.-.Anticipation.of.the.Night.(1958).mpg






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Anticipation of the Night

A daylight shadow of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose held in hand reflects both sun and moon like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promisory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams, becoming the amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning. The trees change color and lose their leaves for the morn, they become the complexity of branches in which the shadow man hangs himself. (Stan Brakhage)

"... a film in the first person. The protagonist, like the members of the audience, is a voyeur, and his eventual suicide is a result of his inability to participate in the 'untutored' seeing experience of a child. Anticipation consists of a flow of colors and shapes which constantly intrigues us by placing the unknown object next to the known in a significant relationship, by metamorphosing one visual statement into another." (P. Adams Sitney)

Stan Brakhage’s films, which number in the hundreds, are central to the consideration of the works in this series. During the first decade of his film-making, in 1958, he made a film which is a pivotal achievement marking both a turning point in his cinema, and that of avant-garde film generally. Anticipation of the Night provoked controversy (Cinema 16 declined to distribute it – which led to the formation of the Film-maker’s Cooperative distribution service) and a new aesthetic. In chapter five of his Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney writes that the film is "the distillation of an intense and complex interior crisis into an orchestration of sights and associations which cohere in a new formal rhetoric of camera movement and montage." Camera movement, Sitney proposes, "challenges the integrity of the shot as the elementary figure of filmic structure." This concentration on movement, on shadows, on lights in the night, flattens and abstracts the image. Drama, and recognizable imagery fall away from Anticipation, which proceeds dreamlike in a "quest for an absolutely authentic, renewed, and untutored vision." For Brakhage this was crucial: "I would say I grew very quickly as a film artist once I got rid of drama as prime source of inspiration." The door was thus opened for so much later work, including The Text of Light, the Arabics and Roman series, The Riddle of Lumen, The Dante Quartet, and more. –R. Haller

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