Dog Star Man (1961-64) Directed by Stan Brakhage. Colour • Silent • 16mm • 74 mins. The film here presents sound added and composed in 2011 by Grant Cutler.

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which must know each object encountered in life through a new adventure in perception. Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and gradations of colour.

Imagine a world before the beginning was the word.

– STAN BRAKHAGE

(Brakhage, S. (1963) Metaphors on Vision . New York: Film Culture Inc.)

In the virtual realm, a new breath of life is being infused into 20th century experimental films. Dog Star Man, American filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s sublime masterpiece, is one of the films that is being celebrated on Youtube & Vimeo, by musicians and composers who have imagined a sonicscape as accompaniment to the originally silent film.

Brakhage sought to challenge the act of seeing in itself – and in doing so, to restore the primeval vision: beyond words, beyond man-made spatial and temporal constructions of everyday life. Alongside American avant-garde artists such as Stan Brakhage, Jordan Belson, and James Whitney, who employed technological innovations to create abstract and meditative films, Stan Brakhage’s cinematic experiments during the late Fifties and Sixties attempt expressions of an ineffable, transcendental dimension of reality and consciousness.

Spanning 78 minutes and divided into a prelude followed by four parts, Brakhage’s major oeuvre, Dog Star Man (1961-64), features autobiographical footage edited into a mythopoeic vision fusing birth, sex, death, and “the search for God”. In the Romantic legacy of poets John Keats, William Blake, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dog Star Man explores a spectrum of visionary experience.

The film trails a solitary individual’s struggling ascent up a mountain in winter, the cycle of seasons unraveling as he climbs, through autumn, spring and high summer where he chops down a tree and finally comes back full circle to midwinter. In this cyclic action, man and nature are intertwined in mythical cosmogenesis. Brakhage’s rhythmic and hypnotic use of rapid montage and multiple overlays, create a trance-like, meditative experience.

The words of film critic Gene Youngblood come to mind, in a film experience which he has described as ‘the totality of consciousness, the reality continuum of the living present‘ in his seminal book, Expanded Cinema (1970).

In Dog Star Man, Time is transfigured. Cosmic, natural and human phenomena unravel in unison – the interconnectedness of our world and universe is revealed.

Text by Sophie Pinchetti