Faustfilm (1987) by Stan Brakhage
Sunday, March 29, 1987, 8:00 pm
New Work By Brakhage II – Faustfilm and Love Sacrifice
Filmmaker Stan Brakhage in person
For this second program of his recent works, Brakhage will present a dramatic sound film, Faustfilm, a modern version of the Faust legend which he has been waiting 30 years to make (early script fragments appeared in Metaphors on Vision). Composer Joel Haertling plays a young Faust who wishes to be old without living through the intervening years. For Love Sacrifice Brakhage quotes Petrarch: ‘Firstly, I revealed in salutary confession the secret filth of my misdeeds, which had long been festering in stagnant silence; and I made it my custom to confess often, and thus to display the wounds of my blinded soul…” To which he adds: “…any sacrifice of love is, yes, ‘filth’ or at the very least ‘misdeed’. An academic reading of Petrarch tends to bias thought that there are kinds of love which might be wrong: I do not believe this.”