P. Adams Sitney Emphasizes Stan Brakhage's Correspondence With Poets in New Introduction for Metaphors of Vision

If you haven't heard: New York's Anthology Film Archives and the film collective Light Industry have co-published a new edition (and facsimile of the original) of Stan Brakhage's Metaphors of Vision, a key film-theory statement penned first as a special issue of the journal Film Culture in 1963. A second printing occurred in 1976, but the text has been out of print since. For Criterion's Current, P. Adams Sitney "reintroduces" the work, which, he writes, "reflects and contains excerpts from the filmmaker’s massive correspondence with poets he admired: Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Parker Tyler, Robert Kelly, and Michael McClure."

He also notes that "[t]he spirits of both Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound haunt this difficult text, which is written in dense, pun-encrusted prose to keep the reader from ever forgetting the barrier of language every theory of vision confronts." Included here for the first time is also an excerpt of the opening chapter from Metaphors. More from Sitney:

Whereas Maya Deren had initiated the theory of the American avant-garde cinema by accepting the filmic apparatus as a given and extolling its “objective” rendering of reality, Brakhage decried its ideological manipulations, urging filmmakers to wrestle with optical and mechanical norms in order to approximate their idiosyncratic visual experiences.

In the initial chapters Brakhage addresses himself to the status of cinematic iconography in a polemic against fear (“Metaphors on Vision”) and an essay about the constrictions of the filmic apparatus (“The Camera Eye”). Behind these early passages are an implied set of convictions: (1) the eyes are always moving, scanning in response to all visual stimuli; (2) vision never stops: the eyes see phosphenes when closed and dreams when asleep; (3) the names for things and for sensible qualities blunt our vision to nuances and varieties in the visible world; (4) normative religion hypostatizes the power of language over sight (“In the beginning was the word”) in order to legislate behavior through fear; (5) the only self-conscious and aesthetically responsible use of language is poetry; (6) only through an educated and comprehensive encounter with literature and art can a visual artist hope to gain release from the dominance of language over seeing; there can be no naive, untutored vision; and (7) the artist is repeatedly challenged to sacrifice the gratifications of the ego and the will to the unpredictable demands of artistic inspiration.

Read on at Criterion about Metaphors of Vision.