Stan Brakhage has been a seminal figure of the avant garde for more than 40 years. Adrian Martin reflects on the filmmaker's critically divisive career and two of his recent films, which have their Australian premieres at experimenta.

A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea (1991): eighty minutes, in silence, of images of a garden in all its aspects, and a body of water. Regularly, the objects before the lens are deformed beyond all recognition, transformed into glittering expanses of light and colour. For Stan Brakhage, this is the culmination of almost forty years of concerted exploration into visuality, perception, and the febrile use of an expressive, hand-held camera. Those who, as viewers, have been able to share at least part of this journey as it has unfolded over time are certainly in the best position to see and feel the subtlety of Brakhage's practice. In Australia, this has scarcely been possible: his oeuvre has reached us in fits and starts, a few of his 'greatest hits' bought for public collections now and again (like Dog Star Man [1964] and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes [1971]), an unforgettable, one-off experimental screening of Murder Psalm (1984) in 1988, and other occasional glimpses of his early flirtation with avant garde psychodrama in the early 1950s or his work on Standard 8.

Just as a certain tradition of contemporary experimental music (one thinks of Warren Burt's sound work, for instance) invites and then demands an ongoing sophistication of one's capacity to hear structures, relations, the dancing, shifting formations of sonic material, Brakhage's films propose a tutoring of the eye, a rapturous attentiveness to the tiniest visual fluctuations and effects. There is doubtless a spiritual dimension intended as part of these exercises for the soul: Jonas Mekas ranks Brakhage's influence with that of "some religious leaders" in his effort to change people's sensibilities and certain feelings and emotions.

Adding to the thick, experiential mystery of these long-developed offerings is a somewhat cryptic, Symbolist aspect. Brakhage often limits his verbal 'explanation' of the films to citations of lines or stanzas from poems by Charles Olson or (specifically in regards to A Child s Garden) Ronald Johnson. The visual 'text' we ultimately see on screen is a dense, camouflaged, teasing, highly elaborated play of allusions and responses to, echoes and transformations of, this invisible source material which the filmmaker keeps close to his heart and to the vibrations of his camera solo.

Attempts by fans to evoke what they actually see on the screen in a Brakhage film quickly turn into breathless inventories of objects-trees, flowers, shade, light, a bird, a balloon-before stopping dead altogether and issuing a pronouncement on the sheer beauty of the film. Yet there is something apt in this helpless gesture, for A Childs Garden and the Serious Sea is indeed a seriously beautiful film which defies verbal commentary, while soliciting a deeper engagement on some other human level.

J. Hoberman notes the presence of "a lifetime of polished techniques - prisms, diffusion lenses, sudden camera movements, percussive shifts in exposure, oversaturated colours, tricks of scale". As he first adumbrated in his 1963 book Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage is engaged in his own kind of guerilla war against all the constraints of 'Renaissance vision' that have become institutionalised in the very design of cameras and lenses, not to mention the more elaborate defenses of conservative mise en scene. His vigorous assaults are directed to the cause of freeing up seeing, and confounding all the old subject-object, perceiver-perceived distinctions.

Partly for this reason, for at least 25 years Brakhage has been an immensely controversial, divisive figure in experimental film culture. Seen as the insidiously powerful godhead of a romantic tradition in the American avant garde going back to the 1940s, Brakhage's films and his authorial 'aura' have been targeted by successive waves of the radical avant garde (structuralist, leftist, feminist, punk, etc.) since the 1960s.

For Jonathan Rosenbaum, Brakhage's films grandly epitomise a "metaphysical conceit underlying the whole American avant garde romantic tradition... which reduces the universe to a list of male possessions: This is my wife, my child, my gun, my dog, my camera, my house, my car, my summer vacation, my life". Peter Wollen locates the 'Brakhage problem' more within a certain in-grown, 'ontological' purism - an obsession with 'film as film' reduced to the tiniest particles of light, grain and flicker, which works to shut out any attention to the materialist 'referents' of social representation.

From another angle, however, A Childs Garden is neither precisely abstract nor precisely representational but - like much of his work - in constant processual movement between these two poles. There is no apparent, structural logic to the sequencing of shots, but eventually a third, some what foreign and menacing element appears to intervene in the dreamy alternation of garden and sea: gradually and incongruously it takes shape as glimpses of a gaudy, commercial adventure playground for children. While Brakhage has always been impelled to evoke a state of bliss resembling innocence - "Eden before Adam got around to naming the animals", in Dwight MacDonald's phrase his films also dramatise, in their way, the violent passage from a utopian Imaginary realm to a more fearsome Symbolic one. One of his films is even called The Animals of Eden and Affer (1970).

Over and above all possible cultural contexts and connections, however, the matter of the singular beauty of Brakhage's work remains, fiercely insistent -and (in Scott McQuire's words) the "complex translation of the seen and the felt to a series of visual marks on a flat surface" which his films activate and so richly achieve.

The experimenta screening of A Childs Garden and the Serious Sea, like the film itself, has its own dialectic interplay of vast opposites. For next to this epic is a tiny work entitled Blossom - Gift/Favor of (1993). Perhaps only 45 seconds in length, it is an exquisite 'flowering' (Brakhage's description) of carefully layered colours and shapes. It works with blocks of re-photographed textures and materials, and the swift, eye-defying mobility of these blocks frame by frame, in the manner of the Dante Quartet series (1987) shown in part at the 1988 experimenta. Blossom recalls to mind Marcus Bergner's remark about some of the current, ultra-short "pieces of intense poetic and imaginative force" in experimental film that bring home "the significance of brief gestures in a world where mass media has already imposed its rules of concision and constriction".

© Adrian Martin is the author of Phantasms (McPhee Gribble, 1994), video reviewer for The Australian, and an ex-President of MIMA.

MESH#4 Spring, 1995. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts

More than any other American filmmaker, Stan Brakhage has - for four decades - passionately plumbed the depths of his own psyche in an attempt to rediscover the primal innocence of vision, to film the world the way a child's unschooled eye sees it. While his attempts to do so have sometimes fallen short, his recent film 'A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea' certainly does not. The film exudes beauty, freshness and joy. Images wash over the viewer in sensuous waves - limpid, inviting, ultimately intoxicating. This co-mingling of earth and sea, the twin lost worlds of Eden and Atlantis, 'limn' the edges of consciousness with organic ecstacy. Periodic flashes of sun and sky snap the mind to attention like the tang of the salt sea in one's nostrils, only to disappear again immediately beneath the swelling tide. 'A Child's Garden' slowly leads the viewer through the childhood world of Brakhage's second wife Marilyn, and succeeds quite beautifully in its empathetic embrace of Marilyn's backyard wonderland. Brakhage is insisting that the act of seeing with one's own eyes is no longer enough; to approach the world with compassion and love, we must first start seeing through the eyes of others as well. (Albert Kilchesty, Pacific Film Archive)

The indefatigable filmmaker, who recently turned 60, employs a lifetime of techniques-prisms, diffusion lenses, sudden camera moves, percussive shifts in exposure, over saturated colours, tricks of scale-to suggest an enchanted island in the midst of some pellucid sea. (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)

This little hand-painted work [Blossom-Gift/Favor] attempts to be a visual 'flowering' and as it is (as film is) a continous art, it would seek some visual corollary of the whole growth process. (Stan Brakhage)