Even in the early days of MTV, it wasn't easy to trace the influence of Stan Brakhage in music videos, let alone Hollywood feature films. The shorts produced by Canada's National Film Board (NFB) are perhaps better known to mainstream moviegoers, given the NFB shorts received theatrical distribution, TV airplay, Oscar nominations and won several awards during the 1950s, when Brakhage began his career. Home video's meteoric success also led to a wider circulation of the NFB's more experimental films, where directors played with film stocks, painting on celluloid, scratching film and negative, and mixed diverse sounds and music styles for shorts that covered every kind of subject.

Good for organizations like the NFB, but more independent experimental filmmakers have had a tougher time getting attention, even on videotape. Pushing traditional narrative structures out the window, ignoring conventional editing styles and inventing whole new methods of constructing mood, tempo, and dispensing with the need for any audio tracks, experimental works sometimes recorded levels of graphic nudity that sometimes limited their distribution.

While arguably not designed for the average moviegoer, artists like Brakhage nevertheless established various new methods to tell stories, and the need to create something fresh today – for a product campaign on TV, over the Internet, and particularly Main Title and hallucinatory sequences in movies – is more pronounced than in previous decades. We need visual hooks, we love visual trickery that challenges the mind, and we enjoy the digital creations that make summer movies the things to see, with sequences designed to evoke and heighten specific moods.

Fans of moody serial killer films, and stylish title designs for “Seven” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau” will get a sense of déjà vu when viewing many of Brakhage's films in this exemplary set from Criterion. You don't have to be an experimental aficionado or, for that matter, be wholly disillusioned with the cookie-cutter fodder that tends to dominate movie screens to appreciate and enjoy the largely silent 16mm and 35mm films showcased here. Brakhage himself admits to attending conventional, formulaic films, so his “burnt-out brain” can get a little repose before embarking on or returning to a short film – perhaps 9 seconds long – that may take a year to complete.

“For myself,” says Brakhage in the fourth “Brakhage on Brakhage” interview featurette conducted between 1996-97 by Colin Still, “my work has largely been preoccupied with Birth, Sex, Death, and the search for God.” Add an outlet for personal obsessions and a hyper-focusing brain, and one can see why his films remain fresh, and sometimes weird, little works. Some of his films may be a little tough going, but you'll catch a shot, a visual puzzle, or an optical effect that will recall something you either caught on TV or on the big screen. (It's also not surprising, that “Seven” director David Fincher is also included in the ‘Special Thanks' section of the booklet.)

Whether it's the multiple dissolves of the epic “Dog Star Man” that, in five parts, use sun flares, birthing footage, and explosive colours; applying moth wings to clear film and projecting it via “Mothlight;” assembling bits of vegetation in the same manor for “The Garden of Earthly Delights;” using negative film for the nude moments in “Wedlock House: An Intercourse;” or painting onto IMAX frames in “Nightmusic,” the images are soothing, gripping, infuriating, and hypnotic.

“Wedlock House,” like many of his films, stars Brakhage and his first wife Jane, and plays with black & white shadows, maintaining a constant candle flame close to the camera, while background visages literally pulse to a set rhythm; it's all silent, but the mind constructs the sound effects all by itself.

Fans of Henri-Georges Clouzot's “The Mystery of Picasso” will find similar joy in “The Dante Quartet,' which offers different framing ratios (Part 2 becomes a standard 1.33:1 within the larger IMAX frame, and Part 3 switches to 2.35:1) for each of Dante's worlds. Hand-painted frames ripple, slow down, pause, furiously rush, hold, and elegantly fadeout before another colourful burst of energy; again, no sound, but the mind fills in the soundtrack for these painted IMAX frames.

One which some may have trouble watching is “The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes,” a 1971 half-hour film in which the director pushed his physical presence to death in an actual morgue, and photographed genuine autopsies. I admit I couldn't watch the graphic material, but like 19 of the 26 films, there's an indexed stream of audio interview material (with no images) that describes the film's raison d'être, and the filmmaker's approach to capturing his subject. Most of the 19 Reflections seamlessly edit material from Colin Still's sessions with additional segments conducted by Bruce Kawin, from 2002.

Another film, “Commingled Containers” was literally shot to check a new camera's functionality before the warranty expired, and as Brakhage explains, was shot during the day before his cancer surgery. Characterized as shots of water, the short is a plethora of movements, textures, geometric patterns, ripples, and undulating, glistening droplets that resemble electrified cell structures.

Brakhage's cancer becomes a focal point in Part IV of the interview featurette, as several segments were taped shortly before his chemo therapy, and afterwards, with noticeable affects. Not surprisingly, the filmmaker addresses his own mortality, and while he labels his art as “passing madness,” he clearly wants his legacy in 16mm, 35mm, and 8mm (using the micro-format when his 16mm equipment was stolen) to add something to Art.

Perhaps a painter before filmmaker, Brakhage's taped interviews covers a lot of ground. Part I offers an anecdote of a gathering of critics and artists at Jackson Pollock's barn; and the theory of “chance operations;” in Part II he explains video's dulling effect on film editing. Part III has Brakhage laughing off the “mountain man” myth applied to him by critics, and his ultimate jettisoning of copious notes when he discovered an innate instinct in constructing double and triple dissolves in-camera; and Part IV, like the other entries, makes use of stills and some black & white documentary footage of Brakhage editing a work, and humorously ‘exercising' his camera moves in the woods like some caffeinated mad hatter.

Criterion's booklet is a stylishly designed guide for the set, using stills from key films, concise synopses for each short, and a lengthy essay by Fred Camper. It's a good intro to his work, and tries to address the nature of experimental films for novitiates, letting them know it's not an easy collection of shorts, but it's worth the effort.

Each film was transferred from new interpositive and fine grain elements, and no visual enhancements or digital cleaning was used to maintain fidelity to Brakhage's eccentric eye; and the five film soundtracks were not digitally enhanced or cleaned up. Wear, tape splices and rough edits notwithstanding, the films look great, and the colours of Brakhage's hand-painted works are sharp, with excellent deep blues and blacks.

“By Brakhage” starts with the filmmaker's first film on Disc 1, “Desistfilm,” from 1954, and includes the following: “Wedlock House: An Intercourse” (1959), “Dog Star Man” in 5 parts (1961-64), and “The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes” (1971).

Disc 2 contains “Cat's Cradle” (1959), “Window Water Baby Moving” (1959), “Mothlight” (1963), “Eye Myth” (1972), “The Wold Shadow” (1972), “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1981), “The Stars are Beautiful” (1974), “Kindering” (1987), “I… Dreaming” (1988),” “The Dante Quartet” (1987), “Nightmusic” (1986), “Rage Net” (1988), “Glaze of Cathexis” (1990), “Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse” (1991), “Untitled (For Marilyn)” (1992), “Black Ice” (1994), “Study in Color and Black and White” (1993), “Stellar” (1993), “Crack Glass Eulogy” (1996), “The Dark Tower” (1999), “Commingled Containers” (1997), “Love Song” (2001).

© 2003 Mark R. Hasan