‘Mothlight’: Stan Brakhage’s beautiful attempt to capture the totality of nature
If cinema is the medium of revelation, Stan Brakhage was undoubtedly one of its greatest prophets. A true pioneer who completely revolutionised the landscape of American experimental filmmaking, Brakhage’s body of work doesn’t just challenge our pre-defined perceptions of the medium. His projects also inspire us to approach the form in new ways, urging us to question the structural foundations of the cinema we’re familiar with.
The 1950s had been a tough period for Brakhage, despite the fact that he made masterpieces like Window Water Baby Moving during that time. Dismissed by critics and audiences who were involved in the contemporary experimental scene, the groundbreaking director suffered from depression and reportedly had suicidal ideations at one point. However, the following decade turned everything around for Brakhage when he finally received the recognition he was long overdue.
Several fascinating projects like Dog Star Man emerge as highlights when we consider Brakhage’s creative output within that window, but one film that perfectly represents his remarkable talent to alter the boundaries of filmmaking is Mothlight. The 1963 silent collage work was made without the use of cameras, created as a result of the director’s laborious efforts in pressing real-world objects like moth wings, flower petals and grass between strips of 16mm editing tape. He described it as “what a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black.”
Initially, Brakhage tried to document the activities of live moths with a camera but decided to breathe life into the wings of the dead insects when the former activity proved to be too much of a hassle. As a result, Mothlight easily transcends the conventional frameworks of cinema because it does not interact with the illusory nature of cinematic images. Instead, Brakhage uses tangible objects and biological matter to create an artistic experience that is directly connected with the world we inhabit.
“Here is a film that I made out of a deep grief,” Brakhage revealed. “The grief is my business in a way, but the grief was helpful in squeezing the little film out of me, that I said, ‘These crazy moths are flying into the candlelight, and burning themselves to death, and that’s what’s happening to me. I don’t have enough money to make these films, and … I’m not feeding my children properly, because of these damn films, you know. And I’m burning up here … What can I do?’ I’m feeling the full horror of some kind of immolation, in a way.”
Mothlight has received widespread acclaim for its reinvention of the cinematic process, discarding its primary apparatus in order to capture a vision of reality that was simultaneously too foreign to us while also being more authentic than anything we had ever seen. That’s also why the digital transfers of Mothlight fail to evoke the same kind of magic that is inherent in a projected screening of the work, relegating it to the illusory domain it never belonged to.
Like all great art, Brakhage’s wonderful creation grabs our imagination and makes us see things that aren’t necessarily there. The flickering blots of organic debris transform into inexplicable images of animals running through forests, of passionate lovemaking, of the destruction of war and of eyes staring back at us. But we’re just haunted by spectres, unable to isolate the pure cinematic image of light, matter and motion from the tyrannical network of symbolic associations in our minds.
Watch the film below.
