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422 The Films of Stan Brakhage While the film presents a narrative, Brakhage attenuates its impact in a number of ways. An important means of which Brakhage makes extensive use is to join diegetically disjunctive spaces into a continuous sequence by matching movement. Thus shots taken from a moving car are joined together by their common kinetic properties. Or the camera moves in on the baby crawling on the lawn; the same speed and direction of motion is main­ tained in the following shot that presents lights from a passing car; the similarity between the dynamic qualities of the two shots join the two diegetically non­contiguous spaces into a unbroken flow. In the same vein, in the amusement park sequence, the relative frequency of splices that join matched movements is uncommonly high for Brakhage. To achieve this effect, Brakhage often collapses the image's depth. The shots which depict the children on the amusement park rides, with lights behind them, seem strangely flat. Brakhage also facilitates these transitions by having a limited range of colours dominate each scene: the interior scenes at the beginning tended towards old wine brown; the shots of the night colours tended towards blue; the scenes in the garden were green; the scenes in the amuse­ ment park tended to orange, and the temple scenes towards brown and orange; the shots ofconcludingscenes (daybreak) are in red. Another means Brakhage uses to join diegetically disjunctive spaces is to employ plastic cutting—to join to shots that have similar visual forms on either side of the cut. At one point in Anticipation of the Night, for example, Brakhage cuts together a number of doors and windows, on the basis of the similarity of their shapes. Another device, which Fred Camper analyzedwith scrupulous care, is substitution: Brakhage cuts from one object to another— substitutes one article for another—that occupies a similar part of the screen to stress that he is joining together different kinds oflight. Thus, for example, Brakhage intercuts similar patterns of sunlight on all walls. In these instances, and others like them, the editing draws our attention to the variations in the intensity of light among similarly shaped patterns. That latter emphasis is sig­ nal because, as Fred Camper again has pointed out,Anticipation of the Night is about light and presents many different ways in which light is formed: the film's opening presents many shadow forms, on a wall, near a door,modulated by the aperture; and in the opening sections ofthe film there are many images of walls dappled by sunlight reflected from some surface or refracted through some medium, so that over time the light undergoes continual change; we are patches of light on the lawn; light split by water droplets into a rainbow of colours; we see the mysterious light of dusk and daybreak; and we see street­ lights, storelights, automobile lights, amusement park lights. The combined effect of these two means of creating continuity among diegetically disjunctive spaces transforms the film into a riddling, lyrical Michael McClure's Poetics 423 work rather than an epic film in a narrative form; the primary means of this transposition is to conjoin shots for dynamic rather than causal reasons or reasons having to do strengthening the film's diegesis. More specifically it transforms the film into a continual flux of light, and this flux imbues the film with an unflagging kinesis. A fine example occurs where Brakhage cuts from pan across night lights to a pan across grass: the cut occurs just as the cam­ era, moving in the same direction and at the same rate as in the previous shot of the night lights, enters a dark patch on the grass that matches the dark of the night. Then the light surges up, as the camera passes out of the dark patch and into the light; the light changes. The intercutting of shots of trees in morning light, of closing doors which gradually darken the screen from right to left within an ominous regularity and sombreness of space, or of different aspects of a rainbow, photographed with a moving camera that several times comes to an abrupt stop, creates a dynamic flux of light and space. One could consider that Anticipation of the Night is composed of a number of motions that present themselves over and over, in various new combinations, of: jittery night lights; slowly opening and closing doors; the steady flow ofobjects—trees, houses, stores, lamp­posts, etc.—taken...

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