Synthesis Paper Two

Essential Brakhage, the documentext by Stan Brakhage, poetically conveys information about filmmaking that may otherwise be dull. This approach makes visual study and especially film study accessible to those readers that can appreciate his style, which like is his films, is quite unique.
Brakhage is inspiring and important in a many ways. The reader can appreciate his own experience when he speaks to the problem of financing projects in the section, ‘Eight Questions.’ This question of access to the medium of film is an important and long standing issue. In this section, he talks about times that he did not have money to make a film, yet he managed to create them by working with what he could get his hands on or by searching for some way to create which involved ingenuity and compromise. This is important because the art of filmmaking in great part is about determination.

An overlying theme throughout the text is light. Brakhage writes both metaphorically as well as scientifically about light. It is important to take note of the attention and amount of space he commits in his texts to this extremely ‘essential’ component of film, which is light.

Yet another inspiring issue Brakhage examines is the place of the amateur. In the section ‘In Defense of the Amateur’ beginning on page 143, he says - "…I, as the maker of them, have come to be called a ‘professional,’ an ‘artist,’ and an ‘amateur.’ Of those three terms, the last one – ‘amateur’ – is the one I am truly most honored by…(Pg. 143)." He explains that it is the amateur that is still able to work, experiment, and make mistakes. Fooling around with the tools and the medium of film is highly recommended by Brakhage throughout the book. This is good advice for the artist to take to practice in order to advance it is here that breakthroughs are made. Once the innocence of the amateur mentality is lost so is the emotion of a piece. "An amateur works according to his own necessity…(Pg. 144)." The concept of being untainted by specific influence or practice is a very complex and interesting issue to consider as filmmakers.

This book of writings takes the reader to many different places much like Brakhages films. Perhaps the point is not to take the works at complete face value, but to allow his prose and views to come to you as the reader in a way that is unstrained by defiance.