In a Dark Time

For me, my favorite film we watched was definitely Stan Brakhage's "Anticipation of the Night". Though it was not an easy or particularly entertaining film, I thought it was particularly powerful and vibrant in its use of motion through a hand-held camera, its focus on natural beauty, its exploration of light and color vs. dark, and its dizzying use of "hyper-editing". The movie seems to be a game-changer to me...Brakhage's film doesn't recall his predecessors. He creates something new, something that achieves a quiet, stirring, visual transcendence that pushes the eye to its limits while also allowing for us to ponder and reflect. Is the film "about" anything? That's a tricky thing to answer. I think its categorization as abstract expressionism is helpful - it is a film that seems to deny any specific meaning, but it still creates and sustains an overwhelming sense of dark, shimmering beauty. In searching for meaning I did recall this poem, which I've posted below, by Theodore Roethke. It evokes alot of the same things from "Anticipation of the Night" and seems to pair with it well - not surprising considering that these works originated in the same period and Brakhage embraced a certain lyricism in the creation of his film.

Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time"

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.