The great majority of Brakhage films are silent. For those films, please be sure to turn your sound system off. I have sat through many Brakhage films, included in group shows that include sound films, in which the sound was left on for the silent works. Since most projection sound systems generate static, and some generate a lot of static, this is highly inappropriate and really annoying; among other things, it creates the expectation that the film is actually a sound film and that the sound just hasn't started yet. Even sound systems that generate no audible static most of the time have been known to suddenly go off with a little "pop" at unpredictable moments, which is highly disruptive of the viewing of a silent Brakhage film.

There have been a number of screenings in recent years of silent Brakhage films with live musical accompaniment. In my view, this is a really bad idea.

When Brakhage presented his films, he was asked time and again why they were silent, and was told it would have helped to have music. He gave a variety of answers, including, "I've learned that I'm just not a very good sound filmmaker," but I think the answer he gave that came closest to the truth is that he had found all his life that the sound track of a film overwhelms its visual rhythms, and that because he was trying to work with delicate rhythms generated by the many subtleties of his imagery, sound would destroy everything that he was trying to do. It was his belief that since the music would dominate, the images would be reduced to accompaniment to the sound.

About showing Brakhage films with music, Marilyn Brakhage, Stan's widow, heir, and executor, wrote me on August 11, 2003, "I don't really believe it should be done. The idea of using a Brakhage film as 'accompaniment' just bothers me."

As these events started to become more common, I asked Brakhage by phone in May 2002 what he thought about them. In his typically generous fashion, he allowed as how he "wouldn't want to interfere with others' attempts to create something. But it's not something I would do, and I probably wouldn't want to see or hear it....They might be doing something really important but they should be absolutely honest that it's not a collaboration. They may from my viewpoint distort the aesthetic of the film, as long as they don't distort that they're doing it themselves, without collaboration from me." He then told a story involving the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When Brakhage lived in San Francisco briefly, "Ferlinghetti would come over once or twice a week trying to create a poem that would go with The Dead. All I can remember is, 'Oh, the Dead.'" But eventually even Ferlinghetti, "with all his egomania," had to agree that The Dead was a silent film.

Here's my interpretation of Brakhage's statement, and my personal opinion about presenting silent Brakhage films with music: One can rent his silent films and show them with any sound track one wants. In Brakhage's view, you will be "distorting the aesthetic" of his films; in my view, you'll almost certainly be destroying them as Brakhage films. Therefore, anyone presenting Brakhage films with music should not advertise this as a showing of a Brakhage film, even if you add, "With music by (let's say) the Psycho Puppies." You are not showing a Brakhage film. What you are doing is using a Brakhage film in the creation of some new entity, and you should give a name to that new entity (or call it "Untitled"), and explain that it includes a silent Brakhage film that is now accompanied by music by the Psycho Puppies.

Most prints of Brakhage films that were struck between the early 1970s and early 1980s were printed from internegatives onto a Kodak positive stock whose colors faded rather quickly. Specifically, it was the cyan dye that faded, leaving the colors a muddy reddish-brown. Many will have seen such prints of older commercial films in revival theaters. The fading speed could not be predicted; in some cases the films will have a slight reddish tinge; in others the colors will be totally gone. This process is irreversible; beware of it when renting prints or purchasing used prints. While any color print can fade, the danger rapid fading largely passed after the early 1980s, when due in part to a campaign by Martin Scorsese Kodak introduced a low fade print stock. The fading risk was never as large for camera originals or reversal prints.

It seems as if this film, an overwhelmingly affecting meditation on war and the roots of violence in the West that is one of Brakhage's greatest achievements, has been consistently projected contrary to the maker's original intent for much of the last four decades. From anyone who has projected the film, I'd be interested to hear one way or the other how it was shown. The 16mm and standard-8mm prints at Anthology Film Archives have no special projection instructions, nor do the 16mm rental prints I've checked.

I was the projectionist at what was to have been the "world premiere" of this film at the M.I.T. Film Society, of which I was a co-founder, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 1967 � Brakhage told me at the show that he had in fact shown the whole thing at an early venue, but still considered our showing the "official" world premiere. We also purchased a print from him at that time. This film was originally made, and shown, in 8mm, the pre-super-8 format also known as "standard 8mm" and "regular-8."

The print I projected was on four standard 8mm reels, the first part on the first two and the last part on the last two. The print we purchased was mounted the same way, and the cans of each reel had the following notes on them:

Reel 1: PROJECTIONIST! SET FRAME LINE CORRECTLY, AS USUAL, AT BEGINNING OF FILM�THEN DO NOT CHANGE THRU SHOWING REEL#1 AND #2
STAN BRAKHAGE

Reel 2: Do not change frameline from reel 1's setting.

Reel 3: Reset frameline correctly at the beginning of part 2. Then do not change through showing of 3 and 4.

Reel 4: Do not change frameline from Reel #3's setting.

Brakhage also stressed these instructions to me at the time of our showing. The assumption behind these notes is that the projectionist will set the frameline so that it is not visible at the beginnings of reels 1 and 3.

The 8mm cameras the film was shot with had framelines in different positions. Brakhage later discovered in editing that the frameline was going to be visible in some of his footage; in fact, with his different cameras and also found footage, he had images with framelines in several different positions which he planned to intercut. At first he was vexed by the frameline problem, but then, in a fashion not atypical of him, decided to work with those frameline shifts in the editing. The effect of his rapid cutting between images in which the frameline is visible (and in different positions too) and those in which it is not is to create a visceral impact at the cuts, a jarring effect in which the images are continually shifting perspective, a kind of perceptual violence. This prevents any the viewer from just absorbing the images transparently as compositions or in terms of content, making the act of perception both visible, and even violent.

But which images have the frameline visible and which do not is important. The whole "ideology" of the film can be affected by this. By not following the original instructions, the frameline will be hidden in images where Brakhage expected it to be visible while he was working on the film, and visible where he expected it to be hidden.

At our screening, though I reset the frameline correctly at the beginning of reel three, it drifted, and Brakhage later told me that if I, who he thought had written so perceptively on his films, didn't "notice" that drift and feel it was wrong and reset it, maybe it wasn't that important. This may have contributed to the fact that he did not follow through on duplicating his original instructions. Brakhage could, indeed, become lax about such details, feeling them too fussy. But I think he was asking too much from a viewer, even a perceptive viewer, of a film that viewer (myself) hadn't ever seen before, and in fact, I don't think the film should be shown without resetting the frameline.