Dog Star Man, Northwest Film Forum, Wed. Aug. 4, 2010
A rare screening of Stan Brakhage’s legendary experimental feature film, Dog Star Man (1961-1964, 75 min.), in its original silent 16mm format, as the filmmaker intended. A new print will be shown.
Screens with Legendary Epics Yarns and Fables, Part 2: Stan Brakhage (Stephen E. Gebhardt and Robert Fries, 1969, 9 min.), an interview film with no interlocutor.
“I wanted it to be as real from the very beginning as life happening.” — Stan Brakhage
Four years in the making, this influential and much-revered abstract work is widely regarded as the masterpiece of legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who made more than 350 films over 50 years. A psychedelic freakout, mytho-poetic dissertation and aesthetic shot-across-the-bow all in one, Dog Star Man is an unforgettable work of high artistry, as challenging as it is rewarding.
Unlike Brakhage’s later and better-known painted films, Dog Star Man draws mainly on filmed actualities. Its components are all contained in the stunning Prelude. Over the next four parts these elements are fragmented, manipulated and recombined in a mosaic of increasing complexity.
On one level the film depicts an intensely mythic spiritual quest, a deeply personal farago informed by Brakhage’s lifelong study of poetry and symbolism. On another level it is a purely visual tour de force of editing and composition that can be experienced solely on its own (or your own) terms.
Dog Star Man was a landmark that proclaimed the vibrancy of the experimental cinema, both by its length and for its radical departure from (most) prior experimental film aesthetics. It influenced (and often divided) the discussion, creation, and very conception of experimental cinema for decades to come. For Brakhage, Dog Star Man represented an aesthetic rebirth, moving past the psychodramas of his youth, which he was already respected for, into the visually tactile poetry of his mature years.
Time Magazine, 1967:
“Stan Brakhage, 37, a husky hypochondriac who lives with his wife and five children in a log cabin in Colorado, has radically rewritten movie grammar. By fragmenting his films into frames, Brakhage has established the frame in cinema as equivalent to the note in music; whereupon he proceeds to make films with frames the way a composer makes music with notes.”
Fred Camper:
“More than any other filmmaker, he defined the cinema as a visual being, liberating it from non-visual considerations, and as visually useful for expressing a totality of thought.”
Jake Euker, PopMatters.com:
“Dog Star Man [is] a 74-minute epic on what Brakhage calls ‘the big daddy’ theme, or man in his natural state as father, husband, lover, and provider, pitted against nature, and seen from the atomic to the astral levels. …Its very conception — a portrait of a man in all of life’s roles — recalls in part James Joyce’s depiction of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Dog Star Man is a work of realism into which abstraction intrudes. It was in this film that he first scratched and painted designs directly onto film, and his use of such devices as under- or over-exposing film or experimenting with focus, not only render much of Dog Star Man truly abstract, but signal the full acceptance by the filmmaker of those methods which bloom so magnificently in his later work.”
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978:
“Dog Star Man develops in mythic and nearly systematic terms the universal vision inherent in lyric films. More than the entire body of the American avant-garde cinema, this work is situated in the rhetoric of romanticism, in its description of the emergence of conscience, the cycle of the seasons, the battle of man against nature and the sexual ambivalence in the visual evocation of an earthly titan bearing the comic name, Dog Star Man.”
