Stan Brakhage

Delinquent" exploitation film--was also typical of a time that produced mainstream films like

Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and Richard Brooks' The Blackboard Jungle

(1955). Despite the fact that film as an art form is dedicated to liberating the eye, discourse

surrounding the experimental film is often elitist and prescriptive. On another day it might

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have been be fruitful to position Desistfilm and its representation of anti-social subjects such

as drugs, sex and violence as a left-field forerunner of such Hollywood films as Otto

Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Elia Kazan's Baby Doll (1956), Nicholas

Ray's Bigger than Life (1956) and Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956). Camper would

argue that we are "missing the point" (Camper e-mail #4). Desistfilm for him represents a

further evolutionary step along the path toward a freer more poetic and visually orientated

cinema. These are the vital first steps in the direction of a cinema inner consciousness, where

Brakhage, as Sitney points out, "successfully objectified the argument between Realism and

Expressionism that was informing his art." (Sitney, 1979).

This is undoubtedly true but it is the execution of the film that suggests a sober

reevaluation of Brakhage's reputation may be in order. Desistfilm centres upon a teenage party

involving five boys and one girl. Lost in "painful isolation" (Sitney, 1979), each character

involves himself in an act that may help him get the girl: smoking cigarettes, playing

a mandolin, pulling fluff from a navel etc. Despite their courtship displays an outsider

enters, and ends up with the girl.

Desistfilm is atypical Brakhage in so much as it has a plot of sorts, and a soundtrack

that creates meaning through interplay with the images, whereas most of the director's works

are silent, heightening visual experience by depriving the other senses. Furthermore its focus

on a social gathering contrasts with the solipsism of his later works. Rigorous scanning of the

academic field of inquiry produces very little in the way of criticism of Desistfilm. To find

anything mildly critical a side-step into the online world of DVD reviewers was necessary.

Gregory P. Dorr, from DVD Journal, describes Desistfilm as a "crude 1954 black and white

short [...] and a fairly dull study of teenage ennui and hormonal sociopathy." He further

condemns Brakhage's visual style as that of "a cameraman struck by epilepsy (perhaps

induced by listening to the screeching, aggravating score)". This Speaking some forty

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years on from the film's conception he sees it as a film that "belabors specific visuals

or effects long after the viewer may have grown tired of it."

Dorr's criticism of the ham-fisted camera skills on display in Desistfilm and most of

Brakhage's other films is confirmed by Brakhage himself who jokingly acknowledges his own

fakery in the 2002 Bruce Kawain interview--that is included on the By Brakhage DVD--that

he belonged to "the shaky camera school of filmmaking" and that he didn't even know how

use a light meter properly:

I mean, I've never been good at things like f-stops. I had to make a

living in the commercial industry, and it was a nightmare for me

because I never... I had to fake it all the way through. By fake it, I mean

I had to just dance around and hope that I was getting the right f-stop so

I wouldn't be fired that night for having screwed up some commercial

soap job or whatever (Brakhage interviewed by Bruce Kawain, 2002).

After relaying Dorr's thoughts on Brakhage as concerns that I myself shared--along

with the observation that Stan's choice of well-timed "exploitation" subject matter was

somehow calculating--to Fred Camper, he replied that, "[...] the film is also shot from a

position of engagement that I think gives the lie to any of your theories about how he might

have been calculating. I also don't find the camera movements at all "ham-fisted." You

shouldn't compare Brakhage's camera movements to commercial film steadicams or

whatever." (Camper e-mail #4).

Interestingly, in an earlier e-mail broaching the topic of undertaking a reputation

debunking exercise on Brakhage, Camper thought him a "strange target". And wondered why

I didn't "go to work on the real cinematic phonies - superficial 'art' filmmakers like Kubrick or

Altman or Scorsese." (Camper e-mail #3).

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The argument that Desistfilm was also flawed in terms of dramatic arc, as proposed by

Dorr, along with the view that