17 - Text of Light

Summary

The films of Stan Brakhage are exceptionally rich in their themes. This is certainly true of his new work, Text of Light, Yet, at the same time, there is a simple and straightforward way in which this film relates to the main preoccupation of Brakhage's overall aesthetic program. To a certain extent, Brakhage's work might be considered as an epistemological meditation insofar as Brakhage initiates, through his art, what might be thought of as an investigation of the relation of the way men see to the nature of the world. Specifically, Brakhage uses the relativity of perceptual systems as a starting point for artistic creation. He writes in “Metaphors on Vision”:

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of every thing but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure in perception.

Quite literally, Text of Light is such an imagining. It is a film shot through a glass ash-tray. This uncommon lens generates an equally uncommon image of the world. The density and shape of the glass subtracts linear perspective from the visual field. In this respect, the ash-tray takes up part of the function of rapid camera movements and zooms in other Brakhage films insofar as the ash-tray demolishes perspective. As well, in Text of Light objects lose their individuation, their outlines blurred in masses of light and color.