Stan Brakhage – Dog Star Man

I feel like this work represents formative abstraction.

Categorisation

The genre of this work I would say is a documentary – he is sharing his journey up the mountain with his dog documenting it along the way with different imagery. It is an odd film as the filmmaker himself is the protagonist, and this feels strange as you are experiencing what he is experiencing through a lens he is choosing. Often during the film it can be unclear what you are looking at, and it makes the audience think about what it is they are looking at, giving every member a uniquely different experience when viewing it.

Form and function

I think that the reason that he made this film is to try and share what he experienced in a way that is unconventional, forcing the audience to consider why he chose to create the film in this way. The film requires the audience to put in work as an active part of the experience to understand what is happening – unlike many modern popular films that can be viewed passively, even being understandable when not fully present (for example putting films on and using your phone midway through). His limitations in creating this film is that he is just one person with his dog, though this could be seen as a necessary element to allow for the film to exist in the way it does.

Process

The process he used to make this film is using 16mm film, colour and black and white. He uses strange and experimental techniques for the time of the film, like painting or scratching in film, distorting lenses and double exposure. I think he wanted to make this film feel very personal and unique, so using strange and unusual techniques helps to get his message and feeling across – it does not feel similar to many other films I have watched and seems a lot more interpretive, and a lot of that is due to the techniques used that further distort what is happening and confusing what is being shown.

Formal Elements

The work experiments with a lot of these elements, with a lot of different colours, movement and rhythm being used especially. Because it changes so quickly from each shot to the next, a lot of these decisions feel like they were made to elicit a more subconscious response, triggering for example what the brain associates with different colours or different ways of movement.