| Description |
The 22 "Songs" that comprise this manuscript are "translations" of a film cycle by the same name, shot by American filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Brakhage understood the work of the filmmaker-of the artist-to be that of document, rather than documentary. He proposed that an artist should present experience with as little mediation as possible. My project attempts to language Brakhage's film documents in as immediate a manner as possible. Each "Song" is presented in six "frames," or text; boxes, conforming to the 4:3 aspect ratio of 8mm film. Each text; box is centered lengthwise on the page, which simultaneously focuses the eye on the text; inside the box and draws attention to the extended margins that border the box. Furthermore, each frame varies the visual density of the text; inside it, much as a film varies the kinds of information within each of its frames. The arrangement of the boxes on the page invites the reader to experience the project as a spatio-visual event as well as a linguistic one. The text;s themselves obsessively return to linguistic and imagistic tropes: windows appear, are broken, and reappear; light shines into the house through these windows, shines over their shards and then across the water outside; the water is striated by wind, the wind moves through the trees, the trees are seen through the windows of the house, bits of glass in their branches and bark. Such a domestic terrain never fully resolves itself, and the reader experiences the joys and pains of the home as a structure that includes and protects even as it excludes and separates. The recurring images in the text; point the reader to the border, to a way out of the text; and into the margins-the literal margin of the page and the symbolic margin of a human making a home for himself in the world. |
