The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson

With Gratitude

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Elder, Bruce (R. Bruce) The films ofStan Brakhage in the American tradition ofEzraPound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson Includes bibliographicalreferences and index. ISBN0­88920­275­3 1. Brakhage,Stan ­ Criticismandinterpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.B74E42 1998 791.43'0233'092 C98­930429­9©1998 WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L3C5 Cover design by Leslie Macredie, using a still from the film DogStar Man by Stan Brakhage too) Printed inCanada All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the CanadianReprog­ raphy Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6. Contents With Gratitude v Acknowledgments ix Preface 1 From the Givenness ofNature to the Encumbered Modern Body 8 The SignifyingBody 12 The TwoBodies in the Philosophy ofArthur Schopenhauer: The Body Observed Externally and the Body Experienced from Within 18 The Modern Body's Unbearable Burden of Being 30 The Harmony of Spirit and Body 37 The Primacy ofthe Subject Body and the Recessiveness of the Subject Body 41 Chapter 1. Four for America: Williams, Pound, Stein, Brakhage 45 Styles of English Metre 45 Meaning and Personal Being: Pound and Brakhage 64 The Seachange: Or, How Pound Came "To Break the Pentameter" 69 Bergson, Hulme, Pound, and Brakhage on the Body and Energy 75 Experience as Energy: A Pattern for Thinking 100 First­Person Singular: Bergson, Hulme, and Brakhage on the Primacy of Individuality 146 Between Self and World:The Image in Hulme, Williams,Brakhage 157 Writing = ComposingSound's Energies, Filmmaking = Composing Light's Energies: Gertrude Stein and Stan Brakhage's Conceptions of Their Media 212 Digressive Interpolation: The Persistence of Emerson'sVision in Stein's Writingand Brakhage's Filmmaking 228 ill iv The Films of Stan Brakhage Out of Stein: ATheory of Meaning for Stan Brakhage's Films 240 The Paradox ofa Perlocutionary Semantics: Brakhage and Stein on Artistic Meaning 261 The Romanticism of Brakhage's Conception ofMeaning 295 Chapter 2. The Conception of the Body in Open Form Poetics and Its Influence on Stan Brakhage's Filmmaking 309 D.H. Lawrence and the Poetics ofEnergy 309 Two Crucial Influences on Embodied Poetics: A.N. Whitehead and Maurice Merleau­Ponty 313 A.N. Whitehead's Project: Reconciling Permanence and Flux 325 Olson's Energetics ofEmbodied Existence 348 Michael McClure's Poetics: The Body Is an Organism. The Universe Is an Organism. A Poem Embodies an Aspect of the Universe's Evolving Form 423 Allen Ginsberg: The Breath, the Voice, and the Poem 432 Action Painting as Performance 442 Glossary 453 Notes 473 Selected Bibliography 533 Stan Brakhage Filmography 545 Index 555 With Gratitude This book began many years ago. I was an aspiring poet who, not too long before, had just published his first chapbook, and was about to begin studies for a Ph.D. when I suddenly had a change in heart. I had done my utmost to drill my attention down on the more technical, logico­mathematical areas of philosophy, so as to keep my artistic and my intellectual lives as widely sepa­ rated as possible (primarily to give my artistic urges a safe harbour from the tumult of the academies); but I was suddenlybeset by doubts about whether I could sustain over many decades the degree of interest in such technical areas as would allow me to make genuine contributions. I needed an alterna­ tive, and set upon the possibility that industrial filmmaking might be a means for obtaining the necessities of living, and allow me to go on writing poetry. So I enrolled in film school to learn a trade. Owing to the paucity,at the time, of academic film programs, my interest in aesthetics, and the happy coinci­ dences that film...