(Re)framing Movement in Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation N°1

• Authors: Emőke Simon
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Considered as one of the main figures of the avant-garde lyrical cinema, Stan Brakhage questions perception. His language of inquiry constantly confronts the spectator with the limits of visual experience of the world and the multiple possibilities of their transgression. Critically addressing one of his short films, Visions in Meditation n°l (1989),1 this analysis aims to discuss the way movement may become a principle of perception, that is to say, according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition - a mode of transgressing the frame of representation. Reappropriating the cinematographic grammar and submitting it to a vibrating movement, Brakhage invents a rhythm which paves the way for a transcendental experience, meanwhile proposing a reflection on the meditative possibilities of the film in terms of the image in meditation. Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking of cinema in Cinema 1: Movement-image, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cinema, allows one to consider movement in its cinematographic and philosophical meaning, a project which in Brakhage’s case seems to be primordial

Keywords

EN

Stan Brakhage; Deleuze; rhythm and movement in film; avant-garde lyrical cinema.

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 35-48

Dates

published

2013-08-01

online

2014-06-04

Contributors

author

Emőke Simon

• University of Lumière, Lyon2

References

• Brakhage, Stan. 2001. Essential Brakhage. Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage. New York: Documentext.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987 [1981]. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 1 : Movement-image. New York: Continuum.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 2004 [1968]. Différence and Bepetition. New York. Continuum.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1994 [1968]. Différence aiid Bepetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1987. Cours à la fondation Femis. <http://www.lepeuplequimanque>.org/acte-de-creation-gilles-deleuze.html. (Last accessed at 20. 08. 2012.)
• MacDonald, Scott and Stan Brakhage. 2003. The Filmmaker as Visionary: Excerpts from an Interview with Stan Brakhage. Film Quarterly. Vol. 56 no. 3: 2-11.
• Sitney, P.Adams. 2002 [1974]. Visionärv Film. The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Žižek, Slavoj. 2012 [2004]. Organs Without Bodies. London, New York: Routledge.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/ausfm-2014-0003