Stan Brakhage and the artist’s crusade to redefine imagery

Cover of Metaphors on Vision by Stan Brakhage

By Nancy Cantu Harris
 
In the same way that Umberto Eco made explaining the world through semiotics his very own lifelong apostolate, Stan Brakhage, in the 1960’s, set himself out on the mission of using moving picture images to create an artistic language that would allow us, in time, to understand abstract and complex concepts such as birth, death, sex and the search for God.

The dissertation that titles the book, Metaphors on Vision, (Film Culture Inc. U.S.A., 1963) opens asking the reader to defy all preconceptions acquired through our eyesight, and to challenge our common need for labeling and organizing everything we see in a logical way.

What would we “see” in our minds if we didn’t have a prior idea of what an object looks like? How wide and deep our imagination would go without being restricted by our prior knowledge of the world?

When I read the premise proposed by the director of Window Water Baby Moving, I remembered a conversation I had with a congenitally blind man who worked as a Braille teacher at the now extinct School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Ciudad Victoria, Mexico.

In order to better understand the way someone without eyesight goes about his everyday life, I asked him how he chose his clothes in the morning, and he revealed to me that he could “tell” colors, he could not elaborate what the different colors looked like in his mind (that’s a hard thing to do even for those of us blessed with the sense of vision) but he said “I can tell you that the shirt I’m wearing is blue, I cannot put in words what the color blue looks like but I can feel it, it just feels different, and it’s my favorite color.”

Needless to say, that exchange was permanently archived in my mind, and reading Stan Brakhage’s text made me draw some similarities between a congenitally blind person, who has no preconceived images of the world around him, and a visual artist who uses cinema to explain, in a non-literal way, his vision of the profound concepts that concern him, since they both disregard conventional imagery to express themselves in a way that others, whose imagination is restricted by their eyesight, simply can’t.