Silence and Surprise – Chicago Reader

The Moviegoer is a local filmgoer’s journal, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

This weekend I watched about 550 minutes of Stan Brakhage films. That’s about nine hours, or 44 of the 51 films screened at the Inventing Eternity: The Undersung Films of Late-Era Stan Brakhage event, organized and hosted by (fellow Drive (contributor) Joshua Minsoo Kim at Sweet Void Cinema in Humboldt Park.

Most of the avant-garde artist’s films were silent. Two of the programs screened at the festival had sound, but overall the weekend reflected this truth about Brakhage’s preferred mode of sound. Silent films, however, are never truly silent. Traditional silent films, for example, were and always are accompanied by music. Brakhage’s films are not, but no matter how silent the film in question is, there will always be sound accompanying it in the setting in which it is projected: the whirring of the projector, for example, and people shifting in their seats, coughing, clearing their throats. I revel in this kind of environment, where the images on the screen and the ambient noise blend into a liminal experience that is close to meditation.

The 550 minutes passed quickly. I felt as if I were one with the images, unencumbered by the inherent discordances of narrative cinema. My favorite of the films screened was Vancouver Island Quartet, inspired by the formative years of Brakhage’s second wife, Marilyn. While it contains some hand-painted sequences (hand-painting on the film itself is one of his recurring motifs), it was the images of water that fascinated me. I wondered if this was how Brakhage saw things. Is what I see not a sublimely distorted imagery born of a visionary artist, but a document of his real vision, a whole new way of seeing the world? I wonder if Brakhage’s films are not just “cinematic magic,” but real magic.

I missed the first night of the screening to attend Trust Fall at the Davis Theater, a film event in which the cinephiles behind the Oscarbate Film Collective (which also programs the Highs & Lows series at the Music Box Theatre) invited viewers to watch a film without knowing what it was about. I can’t reveal the title here—all I will say is that it was an early-2000s Hong Kong action film about female assassins, with a coy lesbian subplot. I loved it. Not only was the film great, but the fact that it wasn’t well-known provided a nice tension that reinforced the frame of mind with which I watched it.

And at the end of Inventing Eternity, Joshua read the following quote from Marilyn about Brakhage’s movie-going habits: “He went to see almost every movie he could, not because he thought it was ‘art’ in the sense that he strove for it in his own work, but because he simply liked movies… he felt more connected to the rest of society when he was at the movies, etc.” If I can never truly understand a Brakhage film – just as one can never truly understand another person, although art is often our truest attempt at doing so – I can at least understand this.

Until next time, movie buffs.