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“Brakhage Meets Tarkovsky (as told to Jenny Dorn)” sheds light on an extraordinary encounter that took place on the fringes of the 1983 Telluride Film Festival. In it, Stan Brakhage describes showing his films to Andrei Tarkovsky in a tiny (6 by 10) hotel room and the explosively negative reaction he received to Window Water Baby Moving, Dog Star Man, Part IV, Untitled No. 6, Made Manifest and others. The scene is crazy: the films are projected right onto faded hotel wallpaper; there are eight hot bodies in the room; Tarkovsky keeps going ballistic in Russian, and his translator hands over the substance of what he is saying to Brakhage, whose heart is “absolutely breaking for the films.” Brakhage defends them nonetheless. Here’s a taste of the exchange:

“What is this? It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just capricious.” And I’m coming back and saying, “Shut up and look and you’ll see there’s a melodic line and shapes don’t just occur anywhere in the frame, there’s a balance.” “But what does it mean?” “What do you mean what does it mean? You have a lot of statements about music in your films...” “But this isn’t the same as music,” and it goes on and on.

Indeed it does, although the séance finally ends in a tedious fizzle when a very bad film (something Brakhage and Tarkovsky can agree on) by an unnamed Russian émigré is screened. Fortunately, there is an epilogue to the story. Zbigniew Rybczynski, the Polish animator who was one of the 8 in the room, catches up with Brakhage the next day and, after haranguing him about the irrelevance of art, brushes aside Brakhage’s disclaimers about the poor viewing conditions for his films (shown on wallpaper, no one would shut up, etc.) with the following:

“Don’t you know that Tarkovsky went on talking about this for the rest of the day? For two hours they were raging and carrying on. And he’s still talking about it!” He said he’d known Tarkovsky for years on and off in Poland, and many people think he’s taken a vow of silence like in Andrei Rublev. For weeks he’ll never say a word. He said he’d never heard him talk so much all at once and he said, “I’m very jealous!” He said he’d never seen him so excited about anything and that my films would cast a shadow through his work.

Tarkovsky only had three years left to live, so the question of whether or not any real Brakhagian shadow was paid forward is debatable. Still, it was in reading that last bit that I felt the deeper pull of something like recognition. Because without ever quite so articulating it, and allowing for multiple imperfections in the analogy, I have been laboring in my work for many years to write like those two men made their films. Or rather, to experiment in my writing the way (or—to shave it down even further—in some of the ways) those two men experimented in their films.

A couple of examples might help make clear what I’m getting at. Mothlight (1963) by Brakhage is a little over three minutes of insect wings and plant shards, which Brakhage collected, pressed between pieces of tape and fed through a film printer. On the one hand it’s a mini visual essay on light, time, material and method of production; on the other, it’s an exploration of mortality, grief, rage and beauty, echoing and pre-echoing Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). Stalker (1979), by Tarkovsky, is 160 minutes longer than Mothlight, incorporates scenes, characters and narrative, actually uses a camera, and relies, as does so much of Tarkovsky’s work, on incredibly long shots. On the one hand, it’s a narrative investigation of humanist wreckage in a post-nuclear nightmare; on the other, it’s an exploration of mortality, grief, rage and beauty, which echoes Europe’s battlefields and evokes deeply othered spaces like the one depicted in Samuel...