The Way to Shadow Garden (1955) by Stan Brakhage
Thursday, April 25, 1985, 8:00 pm
Brakhage in Perspective: Selected Early Films
The Way To Shadow Garden (1955), 10 min.; Cat’s Cradle (1959), 5 min.; The Dead (1960), 11 min.; Three Films (1965), 10 min.; Pasht (1965), 5 min.; Anticipation of the Night (1958), 40 min. Curated by Willie Varela and Steve Anker.
A program of vintage Brakhage films, ranging from the early psychodramas through the maturing of his style in Anticipation… Included are several rarely shown but lovely short films. The Dead was Brakhage’s vision of Europe as a graveyard, “for all the concerns with past art, for involvement with symbol. The Dead became my first work in which things that might easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential.” Anticipation… was a pivotal film for Brakhage and for the New American Cinema — it was his fullest, most daring expression of cinema as an experience of seeing, and was also a brooding meditation on the struggle for creative freedom.