Recorded in Toronto, December 1, 2019.
Jim Shedden: I found this quite horrific poster — I guess Kate did it, maybe Paul — where we did a double bill, I guess probably for Halloween, with David Lynch’s The Grandmother and The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes. That could not have been the first. But you know what there was though — he came to town and he did a screening at Ryerson and a screening at the Funnel.
Bruce Elder: Yes.
S: And I went to both of those screenings. And that was that. And that was when he met Marilyn.
E: Yes, that’s right. And that was shortly after Stan and I had become — when Stan acknowledged me as a colleague. It was an interesting relation, up to that point. I first met Stan in peculiar circumstances, and I think it’s worth describing these peculiar circumstances, because in a certain sense, our first encounter established the cast of our relationship. Or it provided some of the intellectual underpinnings of that relationship, because, as I alluded to a moment ago, at first our relationship was very formal and professional, if you will. I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Toronto, and not long after I did my comprehensive examinations, the graduate program director convened a meeting of all of the graduate students in the department. In those days you had those kind of poster-board flip charts, and he had a prepared set of flip charts showing how many students there were in top-drawer universities in North American enrolled in PhD programs, how many retirements they expected over the next several years, what enrolments they were expecting over the next several years in universities, et cetera. The story was that none of you have a chance of getting a job. That’s basically what you’re looking at.
S: It’s amazing that things got so much worse, and they got less honest. At least then they told you the truth. I had so many friends with PhDs who were, like, suddenly shocked.
E: [Laughing] Yes, that is a huge change. But I was not from a wealthy family, I was from a hardscrabble family, and there was not the same level of funding for graduate students that there is now. One of the things I found — Cathy found actually — going through the file folders was the offer for the graduate assistantship that I would get and how much they would pay me. I had even forgotten that they were prepared to pay, but there wasn’t the same level of funding that there is now. And the idea of years with no income and facing tuition and living expenses and racking up a huge debt and then not finding an academic position seemed kind of preposterous. It didn’t seem something that I could afford to do, simply as that. So, I thought what might I do with my life — moreover, at the time, I was already publishing poetry, and that was certainly what I knew I wanted the focus of my life to be. I wanted to be a writer, a poet, and so I realized I was facing the question that all creative people face, “How do I manage to pay the bills? How do I keep the wolf away from the door?” There’s no way that publishing poetry is going to pay the bills and pay the rent and keep the wolf away from the door — I have to figure out something. And again, while I was at University of Toronto, there was an ad in the Varsity — a fellow who was setting up a film company to make instructional documentaries. This was out in Whitechurch-Stouffville, and I can remember going out and meeting this fellow. I thought, “Maybe I can make a living making instructional movies,” because in those days there was a market for that kind of film, and film distributors, if they did their job well, they were making reasonable incomes, and the filmmakers providing the material to these people were doing OK. There were several companies in Toronto that had full-time staff making documentaries of a more instructional character, so I thought, “I could do that.” Since the apple never really falls very far from the tree, I could be a teacher in that way rather than in the university. That seemed like a good idea, but I realized I didn’t have any knowledge about how to make a film. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I had a certain interest in learning about film. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a filmmaker, but that was the era of cinephilia. Anybody who was interested in contemporary art, contemporary literature, contemporary painting, contemporary culture, would be interested in the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Fellini and the Taviani brothers …
S: Cassavettes …
E: Exactly. Bresson, who was a great passion of mine — I was already very very enthusiastic about Bresson’s films; Antonioni — filmmakers who have continued to interest me right to the present. Anyway, I thought that it might be a good idea to learn a little bit about the craft of film. Handling the materials helps you think about what it is that camera people and directors and editors are doing, how a film gets put together, how meaning gets made in cinema. So, I had gone to take an evening course at Ryerson, and they opened up a program. They were getting ready to become a university, and they offered a fourth-year course, if you will, for students who had graduated from the three-year diploma program, so I thought I would go and do that advanced diploma. They opened that advanced diploma programme as a kind of experimental curriculum to help them form a four-year program ending in a degree. While I was there, they asked me to stay behind and set up the courses in film history and film theory — subjects that I hadn’t studied. I might say, in fairness to Ryerson, there were not film programs at the time. Peter Harcourt was offering a course in film studies at Kingston, and Grahame Petrie at McMaster offered a course in introductory film studies. Joe Medchuk, around the same time, was hired, I think in the architecture school, to give a class in film to people in architecture.
S: Just like today, the art studio program is in architecture at U of T now, too, so nothing changes.
E: [Laughing] Exactly, the circle keeps turning. So, in fairness to Ryerson, there weren’t people, and I was after all interested in poetry, I had read aesthetics, I had a certain interest in critical studies, critical theory, critical analysis, so I think they thought that I might be able teach myself the rudiments of film studies, figure out what a course might have to be, and supplement the existing practical curriculum in filmmaking with film studies courses. Well, the summer before I was to begin teaching, I became anxious — “What am I gonna do in these courses?” — and I was flipping through a filmmakers’ newsletter, which also happened to contain an article by one Stan Brakhage titled “In defense of the amateur,” and I read it with some interest, but what I was most intrigued by was an advertisement: “Summer institute in film studies.” It was to be in New England, that year, in Durham, New Hampshire, and there would be a course in documentary taught be Ricky Leacock, a course in scriptwriting taught be George Bluestone, a class in photography taught by Jerome Liebling — the year before, it had been offered by Diane Arbus. Somehow Ed Emshwiller was involved — I’ve forgotten if he was giving a course or was there as a speaker or whatever it was. And there was a class in teaching film studies, by a chap by the name of Gerald O’Grady. It turned out that Gerald O’Grady had put together the summer institute — that was an O’Grady extension activity. So, Cathy enrolled in the class in teaching film studies; I enrolled in the course in scriptwriting; and my parents loaned me their car for the three weeks of the course. We drove down to New England — many adventures in Boston in getting there, but I’ll let those go — and the classes began. Cathy came back for lunch after the morning of the first session and was talking about Gerry O’Grady and what a wonderful fellow he was, and that he was teaching at Rice University and was giving advice in the high schools and colleges and even public schools in Rice, and that he had a course at Columbia, and that he was also teaching an extension class at NYU, and that his home appointment was at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and that he was on airplanes every day of the week, and so on. And I thought, this guy sounds like an operator. He sounds too ambitious and entrepreneurial to be a genuine scholar. I was kind of sniffy and thought he must be a terribly ambitious entrepreneurial sort, not spending enough hours in libraries and too many hours on planes promoting himself or whatever. But — let that go — Gerry insisted that all of the faculty who were teaching would do a presentation in the evening to the entire group of students — excellent idea as far as I’m concerned. Ricky Leacock would come and give a session on his films to everybody who was involved in the summer institute; Jerome Liebling would talk about his work in documentary films and how photography had led him to documentary filmmaking; and, one evening, Stan Brakhage, who was also teaching there that year, gave a session on his films. I saw the films Western History, Window Water Baby Moving, Door, I can’t remember what else, but certainly those films in that first session, and I knew that this was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life — that this was the new poetry. Of course, I had been aware of McLuhan’s writings, and sat in on classes that McLuhan gave, and went to public talks that McLuhan was giving at the University of Toronto. My brother used to participate in the seminars, and he brought home many, many stories about the wondrous work that — my brother, who worked with Northrop Frye, also brought back tales of what was going on in the science and technology seminar at the coach house. And I looked at this work by Brakhage, and I just said, this is the new poetry. This is electric poetry. This is poetry for our time. This is what I need to be doing.
S: Was this in 1972?
E: Yes. And so convinced was I of that, by the way, that I’d gone down the summer before I had begun teaching, and I had no income whatsoever — we were both living on Cathy’s modest salary — and I told myself I needed a camera, and walked along the corridor at the school, and I saw a sign, “Bolex for sale.” It was a Bolex REX-5 with a 12:120 Angenieux lens, a motor for the camera, a 10mm lens, a Macro Switar, and a 25mm and a 75mm lens, and an array of accessories for the Bolex — all of this for five hundred dollars. Well, that would be five thousand, seven thousand dollars now, but in comparison to what Bolexes were going for at that time, it was an absolute bargain.
S: Then you need to buy film.
E: [Laughing] Yes. And it turned out, the chap demanded cash. He wouldn’t take cheque, he would take any other form of payment; he wanted cash. So, I went over to the administrative office for the summer institute in film studies, and asked Peter Feinstein, who later became Hollis Frampton’s manager, if you will. He then went off and began administering projects in medical research et cetera, but for a time he was deeply involved in experimental film, and Hollis’s manager. So, I walked in — here I am, from Ontario, this is New Hampshire — and I said, “Could you give me five hundred dollars, and I’ll give you a cheque in return?” “Oh sure, no problem.” [Laughing] and he handed me the five hundred dollars and we went out to buy the camera. We had to go to the back woods of New Hampshire, which is really lovely — it really is wild — and this chap had been building himself an A-frame house out in the woods. Very much an Emersonian-Thoreauian sense of things — we have to get back to the land and back to nature. There really was a strong strain of this among certain people in New Hampshire, and I guess he decided that his A-frame was more important to him than the Bolex. He had been at the summer institute the summer before, and he had heard Stan Brakhage speak. [Laughs] And when he heard Brakhage speak he was absolutely converted, and he had to immediately buy himself a camera and start on the path to become an avant-garde filmmaker. Anyway, after this, I began sitting in on Brakhage’s classes on the songs.
S: So, at this point, when you saw Brakhage’s films, you hadn’t seen very many other experimental films.
E: I had seen several works by the Kuchar brothers. I had seen one of the first screenings — not the first, but a very early screening — of Michael Snow’s Wavelength. I was utterly appalled at the response of the audience to it. You’ve heard stories of the reception of Michael Snow’s early films in the early days, and there was jeering and hissing and booing. I was involved in organizing the arts festival at McMaster, and we had brought up programs of experimental film, and we already had enough of a sense of how you could fund bringing up poets and writers — I brought up Allan Ginsburg and Kenneth Rexroth; Susan Sontag came; the Exploding Plastic Inevitable Came, and in fact went to a party in Dundas, Ontario at Peter Rowe’s house with Nico and Gerard Malanga. And shortly after that, McMaster had also brought in one of the very early screenings in Canada of Chelsea Girls. It happened on a day not too unlike this — it was such a trek to get to McMaster for the screening, and there was almost nobody there, because already the snow was two feet high by the time the film was over, and it was almost impossible to get home. Anyway, to fund the arts events, we also arranged programmes of work by the Kuchars — Hold Me When I’m Naked and Sins of the Flesh, and of course we put those in the engineering department’s building, so the engineers would see the posters for Hold Me When I’m Naked. And they flocked to it of course — helped pay the bills — and then they’d leave early. This wasn’t exactly the film that they were expecting to see. [Laughing]
S: So, you were versed already, but it was Brakhage that —
E: Brakhage was missing. We had also met — speaking of trying to learn a little bit about the cinema — Cathy and I also took an extension course that summer in filmmaking, and it was experimental filmmaking, and it was taught by a chap by the name of Henry Zemel, a name that may ring a bell for you or may not. Henry Zemel was a very good friend of Leonard Cohen — in fact, when Leonard was in distress in Nashville, at that time, Henry Zemel had to go down to assuage his anxieties and to talk him into continuing the work that he had gone to Nashville to do — and Henry Zemel had worked at the National Film Board and was friends with Arthur Lipsett. We had already screened work by Arthur Lipsett. I knew of Lipsett’s films by this time — was really quite familiar with them — and then Cathy and I met Lipsett on that occasion. Lipsett films were among the first that I showed to Stan Brakhage when he was exploring Canadian films. The first, of course, was Hart of London, but that was followed very shortly by other work by Jack Chambers and Arthur Lipsett. But there was a confluence of influences at that session in New England. First, encountering the work of Stan Brakhage, seeing this new electric poetry. O’Grady is, of course, utterly McLuhanite in his outlook. He revered Marshall McLuhan; he thought that McLuhan was one of the great theorists of art at the time. He was very deeply impressed by McLuhan’s interest in pedagogy, and the importance of thinking about media in order to understand its potentially baleful effects, and perhaps steering our understanding of altering our nervous system in a way that we would be able to respond more effectively to the new media. And of course, that had been a strain of thinking that I had been exposed to before going, but O’Grady’s incredible passion for this really had an impact on me. And then, finally, after seeing Brakhage’s film that evening, the next day Brakhage was signing copies of the book that he had just released — his first book, The Brakhage Lectures, in the Good Lion Press edition. I don’t know if you remember that …
S: I think so — those are the lectures on Meliès and that sort of thing?
E: Yes. And the first was “Now let me say it to you just as clearly as I can, the search for an art either in the making or appreciation is the most terrifying adventure known to man, for it will threat the soul with terrible death and it will leave the mind moving,” et cetera. [Laughing] Anyway, I of course, after seeing the films, wanted a copy of the Good Lion Press edition of The Brakhage Lectures, and asked him to sign it for me. He was always a very gentlemanly sort, and so, when I went up, “Please Mr. Brakhage, will you sign my book?” he asked me why I had come to the institute and what I was interested in, and I guess I had told him too that the films had had really a great impact on me, and that I was an aspiring poet — I was already a published poet, in fact — and I knew this was the new poetry of our age. So, he said, in signing, “Have you read Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era?” I said no, I hadn’t read it. And he said, “Please, read it. It’s the most important piece of critical writing on poetry that I’ve read in decades.” So, I did. And of course, Hugh Kenner was also a student of Marshall McLuhan. I think Kenner’s dissertation was the second dissertation that McLuhan had supervised. McLuhan introduced Kenner to Ezra Pound on a trip to a conference and so on. So, in a way, that reading of Pound’s verse just re-emphasized for me a new way of thinking about verse, a way of thinking about verse that was rooted in McLuhan’s ideas of the transition from written forms to a return to oral forms in poetry. So, all that came together at once in that first encounter, and really, it’s continued to shape how I think about Stan Brakhage. We’d see each other from time to time. I found ways to invite Stan to come to Toronto and present works. This was in ’74–‘76 — that period of time, right up I guess until around 1981 or ’82. I don’t think I invited him between ’82 and ’86. But, from time to time, I was able to invite Stan to Toronto. He was always very cordial, very gentlemanly, very kind, but it was very clear that he saw me as an academic. He began to read from time to time pieces that I had written, and moreover he had heard of films that I was making, and knew that they were growing longer. Long films, for him, were — despite his having made The Art of Vision — associated with structural films, and structural films, for him, were a moral failure, and I do mean not simply aesthetic, but an aesthetic moral failure.
S: He had to kind of re-construct that idea later as he started to watch films again. But I’ve seen him say that. I even remember telling that story about the fateful visit — he was terrified of having to watch Lamentations, because it was not only long, it was really long, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like it.
E: It was actually at Miami. Until that time, as I say, Stan thought of me as a critic, an intellectual — a dry-as-dust intellectual — who would probably be making very, very derivative work in the structural vein. I remember, he had come up to show The Text of Light, and he saw me and Cathy in the audience at the end of the screening, and he called us over, and he said, “Why don’t you come out to … we’ll go out for coffee together,” and another couple he saw in the audience at the time were Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, and he invited Michael and Joyce to join Cathy and me and him and Joe Medjuck and Linda Beath, who had decided to distribute The Text of Light, for a coffee. And we went to the Courtyard Café for a coffee — I don’t know if you remember what the Courtyard Café was, but it was pretty prestigious, and the cost of a coffee and a cake was absolutely extraordinary. So of course, you could imagine this of Linda Beath, it was all, as they say, Dutch treat, so Michael and Joyce had to pay for their coffee and cake, and Cathy and I, and we were wondering how we were going to make the bill. Michael Snow looked at the bill and winced and said, “Ah well, easy come, easy go.” But Stan was very — he acknowledged that he knew me, that I was working on experimental film, that I was a critic of experimental film, and he was certainly very gentlemanly, but he thought I was a dry-as-dust academic. And then, we were invited by Bruce Posner, actually, to an even in Miami — Miami Waves I think it was called, if I’m not mistaken. Another piece shown on that occasion, by the way, was a slideshow by one Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, also shown at that event, and Sandra Davis was there showing Maternal Filigree. It was a lovely, lovely event.
S: And what were you showing?
E: I had one program that was short films and The Art of Worldly Wisdom. We hadn’t really said anything by this time. And then the next day was Illuminated Texts, and I ran into Stan in the washroom, who told me he was looking forward to seeing the film after the previous evening’s, and he was really taken with the previous evening’s work. And then, after Illuminated Texts was over — you recall, I’m sure, how effusive Stan could be when he was impressed with a work that he had seen, and he’d certainly speak up from the audience and ask questions and deliver a discourse on the work.
S: “This is the best lasagna. The platonic essence of lasanganess.”
E: [Laughing] Yes, it was that sort of style.
S: I never felt like he was lying when he said that, by the way.
E: No, no, this was deeply felt passion. And he was capable of being really carried away by work that touched him. And it was evident at the end of the screening that Illuminated Texts had had a great impact on him. I can still remember what it was that he began talking about at the end of the film. First of all, he knew it was on history and technology and nature and so on — he identified those themes in the work — but he also saw in in a contrast — and there is, absolutely is — between geometric forms of construction and natural forms, between biomorphic forms and geometric forms. And of course, he associated geometric forms with anxiety, fear — an attempt to control nature, to impose a grid on nature — while natural forms were the expressions of a vital urge within nature itself. I mean, that’s one of the great themes of Dog Star Man, isn’t it, which is also, in a sense, an extended creation myth repeated over and over. It’s not that the myth begins and we see nature evolving, but it is about the creative force that is running through nature and bringing all that is to be, creating all of the beautiful luminous particulars. So, he was taken by the contrast between geometric forms and natural forms, which of course comes out again in the Telling Time book — there’s one article specifically on that, and then he also alludes to that theme in writing about other works of mine. But it was hilarious about Miami. These were the days in which the Colombian cartel was shipping drugs into the United States through Miami — you know that popular television program. [Laughing]
S: I’ve seen the Brian De Palma film with Al Pacino. [Laughing]
E: Anyway, so he’d describe afterwards how we became friends — and he did tell the story that I think you’ve heard, that when he was invited he looked at the program and he saw, well, they’re going to show the hour-long film and this and that, and the three-hour film — thank goodness they’re showing the eight-hour long film! But behind that story is too — what’s hidden within it … well, not so hidden, but what motivates it of course is a sense that when he’s invited to events and can see other experimental filmmakers’ work, that he was obliged to go and see it and to talk with them about it and so on. If Lamentations had been there, “Oh my god, I’d have had to go to the eight-hour long film, because I feel that’s my obligation to the field.” So that’s something in itself. Anyhow.
S: Before we move on from there, I wonder what he thought of Nan Goldin. I mean, I don’t need to know, but I’m just saying.
E: I don’t think that ever came up with us. I remember going over and taking a look at it and being quite shocked with its explicitness, but of course that’s a kind of social documentation. I think she’s a very, very good photography. I don’t want to be taken as making derogatory comments when I say this about it. But, mostly, it’s social documentation of people at the edges, at the margins of society. It’s a document of a subculture, and that’s a kind of a genre that … I had known Tulsa, Larry Clark’s book, from long before that, and Chelsea Girls and so on. And yes, I think Stan had been living amongst … that documentation of a subculture was a common practice in New York among acquaintances of Stan’s. So, I don’t think he would have seen it as a shocking new work. So, anyway, he’d tell this story of how he saw the program before and then he was so glad that they were only showing the three-hour long film by Bruce Elder and that he wouldn’t have to see the eight-hour long film. So, there we all were — Sandra and Stan and Cathy and me and Bruce Posner — in this swamp in Miami, and bullets are flying over our heads while the movies are being shown. He really did describe it that way as though he we were in the den of thieves, a very dangerous, dangerous place, and here are these small band of people interested in avant-garde art showing their work to one another, and he sees this work and he just falls in love with it. And, in fact, I knew actually, before we had gone to Miami that I’d be seeing Stan again later that year, because I had been asked who I would invite to the Kodak Lectures, which were a series of lectures at Ryerson with really major artists. The funding was very good; we paid a pretty good fee for people to come to the events. Robert Frank came.
S: He did that one at Innis — I mean at the AGO.
E: That’s right. Oh, there were two. The first was actually in the bottom of the library building. There was L72. You’ve been in that building — the same room that Jonas gave his Kodak Lecture in when Stan died.
S: Right. I remember doing it. We collaborated on the Frank. Don allowed us to do that, which was kind of crazy because we only had two hundred seats, and it could have been in Ryerson Theatre or something, easily. He was funny. Remember, here was his lecture, his actual lecture that day. [Long pause] Any questions?
E: [Laughing]
S: And it was great. It was perfect. That was all he had to do.
E: The talk at Ryerson was so — I can remember going out to dinner with him before. He had come partly because he was friends with David Heath, a guy I liked very much.
S: I’ve never met David Heath, but I have the important book.
E: Dialogue with Solitude. And the book that came out of the Art Centre in Kansas … Manifestations, was that it? No. I can’t remember the title of the book. It had something to do with … it’s a play on solitude. Can’t remember the title, but the catalogue is extraordinary, and one began to see from that book — it collected a number of unpublished photographs by David Heath, and David Heath was a really important documenter of the Beat scene in New York City. And yes, Dialogue with Solitude has the wonderful photo of the person reading Howl and another picture of Gregory Corso and so on, but in fact, most of what David was doing while he was in New York City was going to Beat haunts — cafes, readings, lecture series, soapbox sort of events in churches in New York where the Beats were declaring the need for the transformation of society and so on, and David was documenting all of this. Anyhow, we went to dinner, and I have to say it was one of the — unlike Stan … when you went to dinner with Stan — and you’ll remember this — Stan could carry the conversation, talk about poets and painters that he knew, had wonderful anecdotes.
S: Frank would have been kind of depressive …
E: He couldn’t carry it. The conversation just — it didn’t take place. And then, so we left from this dinner, which was very, very awkward, and went over to the L72 for the lecture, and it consisted of: he’d turn and look at the screen, turn back and look at the audience with a puzzled look on his face, look at the slide, look at the audience, again, bewildered, and then he’d look, and he’d say, “I shot this in Wisconsin in nineteen…fifty…three.” Next slide.
S: He wouldn’t show slides at the AGO, but the one thing I remember that was really kind of profound, I think, was that someone asked him in the audience — it was about two hundred nerdy boys from the photography program presumably; those were the days when women were barely in the program, and then it turned over overnight — and one of them asked, “Is there anything you’d like to do that you’ve never done?” and he said, “I’d like to make a good film.” And I thought, fuck, it’s true, this is this genius almost, or whatever, and he’s made these films, but none of them are actually good. I mean, he hasn’t. I mean, I showed Pull My Daisy when we did the Outsiders and I argued against it. I said “I don’t want to show this,” because I don’t think it’s actually as good as the photographs. I don’t think it’s as good as Diane Arbus; I don’t think it’s as good as Marie Menken. This is not what we should show. If we’re going to show anything, we should show Cocksucker Blues, which I actually do think is a pretty good film — complicated, but … which he doesn’t want to show. Someone asked him about that — that was the first question, of course; someone asked him about Cocksucker Blues, and he goes, “I don’t know, why don’t you go ask Mick Jagger?”
E: I actually think Pull My Daisy is more of an Alfred Leslie film than a Robert Frank film.
S: I can live without it. I hate to say it, but it’s not my thing. It’s fine as a little document of the moment, but it’s not equal to the things that are around it being produced by those people.
E: Do you like Conversations in Vermont?
S: Ehh.
E: I do, actually.
S: I mean, I don’t mind the rest of the work. Me and My Brother — it’s all fine, but if I think about what has influenced people, including filmmakers more, all of those films, or The Americans. The Americans, right? To the reader, we are far from Brakhage here.
E: [Laughing] Yes.
S: There is a key moment, though, because what happens, of course, after Miami, is that he’s now open to your work, and he comes to Toronto. And — am I right — he comes to Ryerson, and that’s actually when the Kodak Lecture is?
E: He does a number of events. He went to the Funnel one night. On the Friday afternoon, he gave a talk to just Ryerson people, mostly students and faculty. You may have come to that.
S: You might have invited us to that. I think it was like — we were me and Tracy and Brad, that guy who disappeared, and Kate, and we were all just sponges at that moment.
E: I suspect that you were there, and then in the evening he gave the Kodak Lecture in L72, if I’m not mistaken, and then on Saturday he went to present at the Funnel. They hung up signs with stars on it: “This way to see art star Stan Brakhage”. It was clear that there was a sort of cynicism about this great man’s work.
S: We were there. 507 King Street West, right near my house.
E: He was going to give a talk to just students, just a conversation, on Sunday. The people who were organizing the Kodak Lectures at that time had asked me to recommend someone to give the lecture, and I said, well, why not Stan Brakhage, and I got in touch with him and got his commitment to come, and from then on I was quite excluded, including from the lunch that they had with him before the Friday afternoon talk, and there were many bits of mischief that went on at that. And because I had been excluded from all the planning, I didn’t know the date that he’d be coming, The National Gallery contacted me about screening Lamentations, so Cathy and I went to Ottawa for that purpose. And of course, I also discovered that the people who had organized the Kodak Lectures hadn’t made any arrangements for any sort of social events or hosting — taking him out to dinner after events. When I saw that, I said to Marilyn, “Look, would you make sure that Stan has company?” For dinner, lunch — would you kind of take on hosting responsibilities.
S: This is Marilyn Jull, who at that time was actually the acting education film officer, I think. She was not actually — she was filling in for Helen, I think. I always remember her as being the experimental … but I’m not even sure that that’s true.
E: I think this is just before. I think she is still at this time a student. In the summer, she took over as the … but this was November, and I think she took over the interim job in April or May the following year. But Stan met Marilyn then, and of course they became fond of each other.
S: And he wanted to do two things while in Canada, I remember now. He wanted to go to the McMichael, and he wanted to go to the Glenn Gould Museum, which doesn’t exist.
E: Yeah, that was actually the … the trip. So that was February. November, we met in Miami. In February, he comes up to Toronto and does a series of events and meets Marilyn, and then he, in June or July, decides that he wants to come back to Toronto. Marilyn by this time is working at the distribution centre. He wanted to look at all of my films, and he did. I can remember that patch of time very well because he would start screening in the morning and look at films until eight o’clock at night, and he and Marilyn would have dinner, and after that, Stan would call and we would have just turned ourselves into bed, and the phone would ring, and Stan wanted to talk about the films that he’d just seen. And that of course would go on for some time. Wonderful. Some of the best days of my life.
S: By coincidence then — I hadn’t really met him then — but on that trip when he was doing that, I was working for Cathy. I was doing some basic bibliographical research on Snow, Chambers, Wieland, Rimmer — I can’t remember what. I saw a copy of it the other day. It was printed on my nine-pin dot-matrix printer from my $4800 XT computer. The printer was probably a couple of thousand bucks. [Laughing]
E: And if you have any of those printouts now you can hardly read them, they’ve become so faint. [Laughing]
S: Does it say Jack Chambers or … Patricia Gruben. You never know. Just kidding. Anyway, so I was in the Centre, going through the files while Marilyn was showing him Lamentations, and so we got into a conversation about it, because we had already shown it at Innis and vaguely written on it for the Varsity. I must have seen it when I wrote that, but maybe not. And there were lots of things going on. So, to me, that’s where it all … you’ve got Marilyn, you’ve got Lamentations, we’ve got all of this stuff going on then, and by then Innis is getting formed. None of us doing anything professionally yet on that side, except for Bart. And then we bring him back. At that point is … it’s complicated, because when he’s there watching Lamentations, he’s just decided he’s going to divorce Jane. They’d separated, and then he got back together, and then he made a film — he made Jane — and that was made right at the moment he decided.
E: The film that was called Confession at one time.
S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to me, what’s interesting about it is how it all kind of … and then he eventually writes “On Canadian painting and cinema,” which is partly his trip out West, but partly about the McMichael and all this kind of thinking. And then we had him — it was many years later, in the ‘90s — but we had him do these talks through the gallery on our Canadian … and they were totally unlike anything that had ever happened, and unlike anything that’s happened since, because when he’s speaking, he’s absolutely convincing. When you go back, it’s a little harder. Like, when I’m trying to explain what he says about Varley’s “Liberation,” I’m not convincing. He’s convincing, but my secondary take on it is like … I don’t know if that’s really… But it was inspiring, and I still actually have more reverence for those works that I see every day than I would ever have had, had Stan not come in and upset the apple cart. He didn’t know he was upsetting the apple cart, because it’s not as if he’d spent time reading Dennis Reid and Harper and all these people and all that. He wouldn’t know all the people working at that time, like Gerta Moray — he wouldn’t know any of that stuff. It was just his eyes. Certainly he’d read a lot of things, but probably not the orthodox Canadian historical texts.
E: He had a love of galleries. You remember; you’ve mentioned it already. Even in the trip that he came up to see my film, one of the things that he wanted to do was to go to the McMichael. We’d taken him there previously; we took him there later. Every time he was in Toronto, he wanted to go to the McMichael. But one of the treats that I experienced was when the Art Gallery of Ontario was closed for renovations. Stan had gone through the Group of Seven rooms before, but while it was under renovation he wanted to see the work by the Group of Seven at the Art Gallery of Ontario. So, I knew that Dennis Reid was aware of who Stan Brakhage was, of what his importance was. He’d seen his work in New York City and he knew of Stan’s colossal importance. So, Cathy telephoned Dennis and asked whether it would be possible for Stan to see anything, and Dennis made arrangements to take Stan and Cathy and me through. And then, I mentioned to Mike Snow that the four of us were going to go through the collection, and he said, “I’d love to be with you.” So, again we called Dennis and asked if it was okay if we brought Michael along, and he agreed. So, Dennis and Cathy and Stan and Mike and me went through the collection. They were just at the point where they were installing the small sketches in the drawers, so he was taking Stan through, and Dennis would open the drawer and you could see Stan — it was like a drawer with a treasure in it. And Stan would stare at it and comment on it. It was a wonderful tour, with Dennis offering a lot of historical background to each of the paintings. And then he had a Lawren Harris, and it was mounted on a pedestal between sheets of plexiglass, and it was a double-sided piece. On one side, there was a Lawren Harris piece from the Rocky Mountains series — those very schematized paintings, simplified forms, in white with a peak and a light above the peak and so on. A very kind of theosophical painting in its own way.
S: So, moving toward the abstract works that he’ll do, but not quite what we call now “the Steve Martin works.”
E: [Laughing] That’s right. And then, on the flipside, was a pure abstraction, and abstraction in that style of the Taos, New Mexico painting group. So, it was a two-sided work, and then I said, “Interesting to see one form of theosophical painting, and then another.” And Stan became quite perturbed by this. To some extent, it was because it was out of his convection, that no artist will ever turn his thoughts over to an ideology, a system of religious beliefs, a system of artistic beliefs — will never take over a set of beliefs from another, that it must be original to the person and grow out of the person’s own uniqueness, his own individual being. And to say that Lawren Harris, whom he loved — I’ll step back from that a little and mention the time that Marilyn and Tom Tibor and Jim Tenney and Cathy and I went out to the McMichael Gallery, and — I’ll admit, not without some feeling of shame, but it’s a feeling that persists nonetheless — the Rocky Mountain series and the iceberg series of Harris are not my favourite Lawren Harris paintings, and we were there, standing in front of one of the iceberg paintings, I think. Same kind of thing — peaked form, white shape, a light glinting above it as though a light coming from another dimension into fleshy material reality. And for me, it really is too shaped by an idea, and it’s not a work whose form really grows out of a complex set of formal explorations. It’s as though it’s a simplified, pre-existing form that’s imposed on the painting. So, I allowed — I feel awkward saying this, but — that’s my thought about Harris’s painting of this period. And Jim Tenney shared my belief, my skepticism. Then Stan said, “No, this is a perfect example of moving visual thinking.” This wasn’t a term that was coming up in his writing at the time; this is just before he introduces it into his writing. It’s a notion that is being formed at this time in Stan’s life. So, I asked him, “What do you mean by moving visual thinking? And how is this an example of moving visual thinking?” And he said, “I’ll tell you. I’m thinking now about my home and Arapaho Peak” — that peak that overlooks Boulder, where he was living — “and I first have a vague sensation, and then I begin to form a kind of template for the well formed, well worked out, detailed image. Before that comes to my memory, there is a vague feeling of energy, and then there is a sense of the kind of un-fleshed out template that the image will evolve from. That template is moving visual thinking.” And then I said, “It’s just as the prime matter of vision is being shaped into an image?” And he said, “Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.” I still wasn’t entirely convinced of the merit of the painting, but I did find it a really telling statement of what he means by moving visual thinking. And of course, that sense of what moving visual thinking is relates to the story Stan tells that he took from Charles Olson. Charles Olson was attending the Ezraversity, going and visiting Pound out on the lawn of St. Elizabeth’s and Pound would discourse on translating Greek poetry, on the form of Greek tragedy, on Sappho, on Confucian ethics, on Major Douglas’s economics, et cetera, and would speak about his own poetry and sometimes read texts and provide verbal glosses on the text and the like. But, quite often, after some time, Pound’s monomania would manifest itself and he’d begin to fulminate against the Jews. And on one occasion, Olson, who was of course quite liberal — he had had a minor post in FDR’s administration — at one point he couldn’t take this fulminating anymore. Brakhage was aware that that went on. He had been invited to go to the Ezraversity, to accompany friends to the Ezraversity, and he refused to go. Anyway, Olson hears Pound fulminating, and says, “You know Ezra, I have Jewish blood in my veins.” He didn’t know whether he did or not, but he was criticizing Pound. He just couldn’t take it anymore, and he just wanted to object to what was occurring. And Pound gestures toward Dorothy, “Dorothy, bring me the book!” And the book is a book of European names, and a record of whether anyone of this name had married a Jewish person, whether someone with this name might have Jewish blood in his veins, as Olson had claimed. Olson didn’t even wait for the response, to learn whether in fact the book bore him out or not, and he left, and he went to his hotel room and lay down. And then, he says, “The master” — who the master is is not identified in Olson’s writings, but Brakhage got from Olson that it was Pound — “The master came to me in a dream and said, ‘From rhythm is image, from image is knowing, from knowing, there is a construct.’” And I take it that this is a story that Stan was fond of recounting, and I take it that he saw this about moving visual thinking. I said, when he thinks about Arapaho Peak, there is a vague feeling that begins to run through his body, rather like a rhythmic pulsion. You might remember Dennis Lee’s comments on cadence and so on, and how a poem begins, and it begins with a throb, which he calls a cadence — a kind of pulse which begins to make itself felt in the body, and then out of this emerges a kind of image for the poem, in Dennis Lee, and a kind of template for an image, in Brakhage’s moving visual thinking. And then, it becomes fleshed out, from rhythm, the pulse, is image; from image is knowing, as it becomes more and more a worked-out representation of reality; from knowing, there is a construct, which becomes the system which we build around image, and image-knowledge if you will — something that Stan then goes on to fight against. His exchanges with me and the dangers of image — “Bruce Elder is the master of picture, and he’s doing everything that he can to avoid picture” — and a fair amount of Telling Time is on our differences and our debates over this. From rhythm is image; from image is knowing; from knowing, grasping the world through representation; and then this becomes a system of understanding the world — a construct. And this is what Stan thinks art work should avoid.
S: That does remind me of the conversations that came out of the salons, and I want to talk about the salons for a second, because various forms of the salon emerged, inspired, I think … I think, of all of us, Stan was the first to host, in this tiny little apartment that he was renting with Marilyn — I don’t remember where that was, even, somewhere in the west end I think
E: [To third person] Do you remember the name of that street? Windermere! I wanted that because I thought it was so ironic. Wordsworth! [Laughing]
S: I’m going to walk down the street and someone’s going to ask me, and I’m going to forget your name. But I will remember Windermere. I remember that little place, and Stan was like, “It’s possibly the most palatial place I’ve lived in.” You know, he’ll have his own take on it.
E: It was lovely. I liked it.
S: I did too. But he was showing us something he’d been doing for years, and it’s not like we didn’t know about salons — certainly I’d been interested in that culture, and I knew about Stettheimer and I knew about Paris, and I knew all that kind of stuff —
E: There’s another connection that I want to mention, and that is that, when he was living in San Francisco, living in Robert Duncan’s basement part of the time, he was attending the salons that Kenneth Rexroth held at his place. And of course, that was an extraordinary group of people.
S: He was a teenager.
E: Lawrence Jordan also attended Kenneth Rexroth’s salons. Wallace Berman showed up at times. Jack Spicer showed up at times.
S: We have an image of it in “Pull My Daisy” actually. Like, I have this image and I’m really attracted to it, and what was really great was that it really became real here. Stan got the ball rolling, didn’t ultimately stay here, but then you and Cathy began regularly hosting salons around film poetry, wine, beer and sausages — it has to be said. Then I started doing things on Henry Street, and Kate would do things in the art studio off of Baldwin, and Jim Tenney of course did the afternoons.
E: Jim really took them over.
S: And then Barbara Feldman. That’s the other thing too — lots of great things happened at this time. Part of it was that culture and just creating a kind of community of like-minded, like-spirited people or something like that.
E: Stan really had a role in gingering that.
S: But then the other thing was also erasing silos, because we all tend to live in our silos, and I don’t want to live in one — and it’s complicated. I understand now why people end up just being with music people. But in all of that, there was an attempt to bring a mixture of music, film, visual art, poetry, and just kind of fellow travellers were included — people who were interested, but who might be, you know … And I still feel like I have that in aspects of my life, but there was that not even ten-year period where we had that very intense thing going. Stan was not around for most of it, but he planted the seed.
E: Stan planted the seed, and of course, whenever he did come back, we’d organize a salon with him. You remember the wonderful time when he came and gave everyone one of the Songs? He had the 8mm songs. Absolutely precious things.
S: We also did them at Bart’s place too, because that’s actually where we first saw Dave Morris’s films, for example. But at your house, there were, as I said, sausages, but it also was also like, Tati and all these things that were — it didn’t feel so bound by the things you do when you’re programming for the public, you know?
E: You’re quite right that it was extraordinary how transdisciplinary these events were. I mean, I can still remember so many of the people who attended Jim Tenney’s salons — musicians, but also poets … What’s the name of that guy who did Yiddish for Pirates? I’m blanking now, but that fellow would be showing up to Jim Tenney’s salons. He’s also a composer of course, as well as a wonderful novelist and a great avant-garde poet.
S: Nick Gotham, who died a few years ago, was there regularly, and then Paul Dutton and of course, Lorne [?], and then different, you know …
E: But Stan — starting shortly after my parents passed, Stan stepped in in loco parentis, and Cathy and I would regularly get a phone call on Saturday night or Sunday afternoon — the traditional time for parents to call their children.
S: Long-distance rates were cheaper.
E: [Laughing] Yes. And we’d talk, and we’d have long, long, long telephone conversations. I hear that at one time, Stan had such conversations with Hollis as well. But I would say the majority of the time was spent talking about new poetry and about his acquaintances among the San Francisco poets, but also oddly veering into poetry of the Romantic era — many, many conversations about Wordsworth. He became, at one time, remarkably interested in Alfred Lord Tennyson, and I can remember him, in a series of long conversations, passing onto me his latest thoughts on Tennyson, whose poetry he was reading and re-reading avidly at the time. And, yes, about some of the classics, including Homer — he’d go back and visit the Odyssey and so on. This came up, too, when we were talking about my interests in oral poetry and the work that was being done on Homer as an oral poet. And some of the piece for Barbara Feldman … many of those are those sorts of stock idioms — “the wine-dark sea” and so on — emerging in oral poetry. The kind of phrase that a person who is improvising returns to, rather as a jazz musician returning to a common phrase that he will then develop in a new direction. At any rate, when we’d visit — we’d see each other probably three times a year for most of this period — when I’d see him in Boulder, a lot of the time was spent in showing me the art books that he was spending most time with. I remember a long period in which he was interested in Joan Mitchell and in Riopelle, and was one of the few people I knew who knew Riopelle’s work at this time. You were talking about he probably didn’t read a lot of criticism of painting — I think that’s absolutely right, but I think at the same time, what he was doing was spending a lot of time, both in galleries and with art books. He had a huge collection of art books, which he absolutely treasured.
S: And he knew the culture. The first salon he had, he invited Chris Dewdney, for example. And I don’t agree with him on this, but he said, “Dewdney is really the poet we should be celebrating, not Ondaatje” and all that. And I was like, well, I’m not really sure about all that, but sure — it’s amazing that this filmmaker comes up and actually has an opinion about that, and has actually immersed himself and would have known Billy the Kid and “Rat Jelly,” and then Dewdney’s work. That was amazing. It was amazing as a kid, because at the time — that’s still before the congress — as we said, 1989 is the dividing line in that — and when I wrote this article on your film, before I’d really seen his films, in ’85, my daughter is this old now. She’s 22, and that’s how old I was when I did that. So that’s really amazing. And I was only a few years older when I worked on this. I’m so lucky to have met you and Cathy and then suddenly it’s like, oh yeah, Brakhage. There’s Brakhage in my life, of course, in many different ways, for many years, and through different — it’s hard to talk about this, but when you were just talking about visual moving thinking and Lawren Harris and all of that, I was thinking, the interesting thing about all of this is — and I’m absolutely interested in aesthetics, as really an amateur, and art criticism and film criticism and all that — but ultimately I think, when I have an experience with something, I’m not swayed, at least not right away, by anything intellectual. And I think I was when I was younger, when things were still being formed, whereas now I’m just kind of like, “I don’t like those Harrises.” There may be a reason why, or it may be that my retina is just not interested. Maybe I see too many of them, or maybe it’s because I work in the wrong place. There are all these factors that come in, which doesn’t at all invalidate anything that is being said. I’m just realizing now, though — because that kind of came up a lot at the salons — often we were in rooms no bigger than this, watching films in a very intimate way and then having discussions about them, whereas I think if I was … I don’t know. I’m just thinking back to that time when I was maybe more … I was impressionable, which was probably good, in a way, but now I trust myself more; I trust my senses more.
E: Look, one of my reasons for mentioning the time that Stan spent in galleries and his love of looking at reproductions of paintings and even dwelling on them was the encounter with the object itself, and that that should be what’s at the core of our judgment about the work. Yes, of course, as we’re obliged to make discriminations — that’s an increasingly unpopular view, of course, but the fact is, I have to allocate my emotional, intellectual, sensory resources to work that is going to enrich me, that will sustain me, that will make me — I hope — a more interesting and richer and more harmonious human being … of course we have to make discriminations, but at the core should be the actual encounter with the work. And of course, this is so rare in universities. It’s so rare in the art world at present. There is a theoretical construct, to go back to that term. You understand, in moving visual thinking, he’s talking about how we move farther and farther away from this core experience — the way that the work shakes you. Of course, I approach this in writing on Brakhage through McLuhan, as he modifies the slogan that makes him famous, “the medium is the message”
S: “The mass age.”
E: There’s that, but also, “the massage.” The medium is the massage. And it’s how it works you over — you literally experience this colour of green shading into yellow or something of that and all of the variations and gradations there, and they vibrate in you; they are shaking you. That has to be the core of the response, and I think I’ve been brooding in the past few years on that wonderful late book of Brakhage that is still unpublished — and, since you’re here, I’m really going to put in a word: I can’t imagine a more important piece that the Art Gallery of Ontario might publish than the piece titled “The domain of aura.” It really is a piece that needs to appear.
S: Sorry, I’m only sighing because … it’s not what we do.
E: How much work is left!
S: No, it wouldn’t be that much to publish it, but it would be a lot for us to publish it. That’s a whole other three-hour interview.
E: You know, though, that P. Adams began work on it and has been hoping that the piece would … he decided when he read it that it had to prepare, and he’s prepared an edition of it that I understand is all ready to go, but there’s no one to publish it yet. But anyway, I’m just twisting your arm on that one, but that of course began as “The Dominion of Picture,” and he began writing it not long after he saw Lamentations. “The dominion,” because he’s up in Canada, the dominion, and then “picture” because you know that his engagement with me is that “Bruce Elder is the master of picture,” but he is wanting to distance himself from picture — going back to Olson, the construct that develops out of the originary experience, and he wants to track back to that originary experience. But he associates this quite literally with energy, and with body energy that is also attuned to cosmic energies. And I think there’s an aspect of this in Pound — I don’t think we have time to go into that here, but I think we could trace in some way that notion of body energy and cosmic energy and the connection between the two back to his interest in Pound —
S: Also McClure and all those people too.
E: Absolutely. And one of the things I’m writing on now is how much this group shared these ideas, and I even think I can trace them back to Rexroth and those salons. So that’s another topic, but that’s going to take us quite far from our reminiscences of Stan Brakhage, but I wanted to say that that’s, of course, also an aspect of his interest in Liberation — the Varley painting — and he sees that as evidence that Varley had the experiences of aura that Brakhage also had. When I’d see Stan after not having seen him for some months, when we’d first meet in a restaurant just after Stan had arrived in Toronto, or when I’d see him in Boulder, he’d comment on my aura. He claims — and I’m not about to dismiss such claims, that he could see energy forms around bodies. This is not an uncommon claim, and interestingly, given his respond to the theosophical side of — I didn’t finish that … I’ll leap back to that double-sided painting and then I’ll come back to “The domain of aura” … I mention this, that these are both theosophical paintings, and it’s interesting how the same kind of conception of the relation of material forms to that which is above material — spiritual, cosmic forms — manifests itself in both the Lawren Harris Rocky Mountain painting and the American, abstract Taos painting. Anyways, Stan was upset about my saying this was a theosophical painting, on the grounds of the need for absolute individualism and everything must grow out of the unique self and so on. And then Dennis said, “No, Stan, actually Lawren Harris was deeply involved in the theosophical movement and he gave a lecture every year for the Toronto Theosophical Society …”
S: Do you have our book Mystical Landscapes?
E: Yes, I do.
S: It’s a flawed book, but Cathy was right to pick up and have people explore that thread.
E: I actually like the book. But then, Dennis began to tell Stan that in fact Lawren Harris was a deeply committed theosophist and that it was a life-long interest of his. And then Micahael Snow waited … “Yes, those were beliefs that were taken up by so many at the time, and they became almost canonical beliefs so that if you were an artist you subscribed to them,” and then he said, “You know, it’s almost like feminism in our time.” [Laughing]
S: I don’t know, you’ve spent a lot of time talking about Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous …
E: Oh, I do, but I’m not … that’s another matter. [Laughing] I wanted to say that I think that his interest in energy and energy forms and auras as they are written about in “The Domain of Aura” — these ideas go back earlier to the time when he was making what he sometimes called the emignostic [?] works: the Arabics, the Roman Numeral series, the Babylon series, the Egyptian series, and so forth. You see, I feel such unresolved feelings about the different bodies of work that Stan made and what their relationship to one another is, for there’s a part of me — and I really think it’s the Poundian luminous-particulars side of me — that is rapturously enamoured of the photographed films, right from the time of Window Water Baby Moving right through Dog Star Man, right through the Visions in Meditation series, the Vancouver Island trilogy — Mammals of Victoria, The God of Day is Gone. And yet there is also — I wanted to say that when I first saw his films, at the very first screening, I think I saw, in still-inchoate form, an urge toward a kind of abstraction. I saw this in Western History, I saw this in Door, despite their representational content and so on. And that is Brakhage moving toward — there’s a critical piece by Clement Greenberg, “The new sculpture,” and in it he begins to talk about the “common style,” and he’s saying this partly because he thinks that this common style is evident in painting and in sculpture, and it cuts across many different movements in art. He sees it emerging in Piet Montrian as well as in abstract expressionism as well as in post-painterly abstraction and in Barnett Newman and so on, and David Smith’s sculpture. He even dates it back to Rodin. But when he’s talking about it, he says that “the dominant feature of the common style is that it no longer aspires to give the illusion of material; rather it is aspiring to render visual forms entirely optical — whether they are pictorial, sculptural or architectural — and this brings anti-illusionism full-circle. Instead of the illusion of things, we are now offered the illusion of modalities, namely that matter is incorporeal, weightless, and exists only as a mirage.” A very interesting text, but again, that sense of pure opticality, that we’re not representing matter. The illusion is not of material things; it is the illusion that matter is incorporeal, is weightless — ephemeralized, if you will, to use my term. It’s like a mirage. And is that not the character of the Arabics? Is that not the character of the painted films — of masterpieces like The Dante Quartet, of Loud Visual Noises, of so many of them, the painted films — that this has escaped from matter and become purely optical, entirely like a mirage. Greenberg is seeing this as what painting is moving toward, and at point, when he was talking about this emerging he said that this was the Pisgah view, the view from the mountain toward the promised land — Yahweh showing Moses the promised land from this mountain — that that is what painting from the impressionists on was aspiring to be and was moving towards. And I’ll argue that film actually brought us into the promised land, that it could literally — these figures of light on the cinema screen, entirely incorporeal, entirely weightless, floating into this — this is something that cinema is capable of, that no other art is. We still have to make sculpture out of wood or metal or bricks or whatever; we still have to make painting out of goo, but film can literally be like a mirage — the illusion of modalities, that matter is incorporeal, weightless, like a mirage. Film carries us to this promised land, and in a way, I think that what Brakhage was writing after — I don’t know, there was a period in which there’s the Metaphors on Vision and then a series of pieces in which he’s debating photographicness and document and this sort of thing, and at times touting Ricky Leacock as the great film artist and so on, making pieces like the Pittsburgh Trilogy, and then after that, sometime around ’85 or ’86, he begins to move toward this view. He hadn’t read this piece of Greenberg’s; he didn’t use the term “the common style,” but he began to argue, essentially, that film had carried us to this promised land of realizing this common style, and I think that “The Domain of Aura” carries that to its culmination.
S: That’s really interesting, and I hadn’t thought about it that way, and the Greenberg quote is really interesting, but I’m just going to bring it back because we only have a little bit longer and I want to get to at least two things that came up in that era. For me, going back to what you were saying in the beginning about being conflicted, around the time we did the first screening of Brakhage work at Innis, which you may recall, we were starting to see the hand-painted films, and they were very seductive. They were very easy to like. I can show them to people who have no interest in experimental film, and they go, “fuck.” They have that experience. They are astonishing. So, I had that experience. And then, as you know, we had the 35mm film of The Dante Quartet, which, on our reunion, we showed that print. We showed that print because I had to look at it, and of course it looked like any film that had been around for a while at that point — that was the interesting thing — but of course when we showed it, we gouged it, and then I sat next to Stan and —
E: I want to interrupt, because I want to say that what you were doing at Innis at this time was the best way to show experimental films, and that is, you didn’t program a long, long program. It was 45 minutes of film or whatever, and people could ask to re-screen a film. And yes, it’s true when we look at a film like The Dante Quartet, we see it, and we’re just introduced to what we should be looking at, and then we know the next time through what to see. We should see it ten times, but at least you would show it a couple or three times. And then, that led to … [Laughing]
S: Of course, we live on earth, and we might be out here in our experience, but we still have film —
E: [Laughing] And you’d done everything you could to make sure that that 35 mm print would be well projected. You hired a union projectionist; do you remember that?
S: Yeah, yeah. And then we stopped doing that. And then we only hired the young women.
E: You showed it the first time, and everyone was stunned, and then you showed it the second time, and it was apparent that it had been scratched on the first screening.
S: Gouged is the term. Third degree.
E: And you were sitting beside Stan. [Laughing]
S: Well, but then what happened is, Stan was amazing, first of all — he didn’t have a Kubelkian temper tantrum or anything — and then we showed Anticipation of the Night. And so, what happened then was, I’m trying to hold onto something, because I’m so full of remorse, and there is Anticipation of the Night, and I have almost never had such a connection to a film as I did that day. So, I like the term “moving towards.” I don’t necessarily want an artist to be “resolved.” I think a lot of the abstract expressionists became boring. Whereas Pollock — drinking and driving again — he dies before he gets to be boring. But he’s always corporeal still — to me, there’s always a sense of body. It’s just splatter. And I need it, somehow. And I like most of Stan’s films — I do want to get to this — but there are films I don’t like. They’re neither of the ones we’re talking about. Before he really hangs out in Toronto and we emerge — the kids — Stan makes a number—
E: You were young at this time. It’s amazing how much you were doing when you were young.
S: Well you know, when we showed Lamentations, Kate was 19. Tracy was 19. Mike and I were 21. […] was 21. But Stan, of course, in the late ‘80s was having this huge and productive crisis — crisis in his marriage, crisis with the mountain, crisis with everything — and he was suddenly opening up, and that led to The Dante Quartet on the one hand, and these collaborations with Joel Hartling and the avant-garde musicians and all that, and some of that stuff I love. But then he makes the Faust series. Man, I tried to like those. I was just like — most films that I watch are sound films, but I’m like, Stan, maybe you should just stick with silence. Maybe one day, I’ll like them. But I remember that feeling of like, well I expect this. I don’t trust artists who always make good work. I like artists who are messy, who are always throwing stuff out there. The artists who only make a couple of things — Bresson’s always good, but I’m more Fassbinder actually. “Moving towards” is a good term, you know? I still find more solace in that now — someone human trying to deal with the imperfection and the impossibility of knowledge and all that.
E: Well, there’s a heck of a lot I’d like to say about it, and obviously it’s not going to get said, but about the Faust series, I’d like to say, first, that I think it itself is about this tension between representation, or picture as he calls it, and primal energies. This is an aspect of it, and it is reflected not only, but certainly in the relationship of sound and picture. And in fact, some of the text that is used in the Faust series is from “The Domain of Aura.” And so, it is on one hand partly about this, and how it is about this goes back to Gertrude Stein, and I think Stein’s own work on Faust — Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights — is certainly one of the major inspirations for that, as well as the Robert Duncan Faustus play. So, there he has those great sources. Stein is very largely about the use of ordinary words, American language, focus on particulars, immediate locale, local events and so on — very much rooted in particulars and in the American language itself — but the form becomes pure rhythm. You read it and you read it aloud — do you remember Ulla Dydo reading “Business in Baltimore” and so on — and the forms becomes pure … that pulse that I was talking about. The repetition becomes pulse, and yet it is fashioned out of ordinary language, making reference to local experience. So, that tension I think is built into the Faust series. But there is another thing I wanted to say quickly about silence in Brakhage’s films. It’s a topic that we could talk about for a long time, but one of the wonders of the cinema for me is cinema as trans-sensorial. That is to say that it involves sound and image to begin with, or sound and text and image — I’ve tried to push this very far — but interested in the way in which a picture experienced without sound is not experienced the same way as when you put a sound beside it. The picture is changed, the sound is changed. There is a kind of trans-sensoriality, if you will, and Brakhage can be very good at this, but I also think that he chose to distance himself from it, and chose to distance himself from it partly in order to create this experience of weightlessness, of immateriality. Because, one of the things I’m going to say is that sound accompanying picture makes a weightier, meatier, fleshier experience, and he wants it to go into pure figures of motion, of opticality if you will. And so, he has all of his training in sound — violinist, boy soprano, this that and the other … There’s one thing I realize that we have to do, and didn’t do. I remember David asked me to do this, so we’d better do it for them. My name is R. Bruce Elder, and …
S: My name is Jim Shedden.
E: This tape is going to be transcribed and deposited in the Brakhage Archive at the University of Colorado. I give permission to the archive for public access to this recording and transcription. Do you, Jim?
S: Likewise. Full creative commons on my part.