In early 2025, Miguel Santos, a young Brazilian, started writing to me, in English, about cinema. He was 16 at the time. Just starting to look at Brakahage's films, he asked some questions:

In this conversation I want to start only with Brakhage, since he's one of my favourite filmmakers, though I find it difficult to understand what makes him so... amazing? For example, in The Wonder Ring, what I loved in this movie is that the "deformations" of the world came through reality itself (the windows, the speed of the train and the colours/light/darkness), but, it's just that? What makes The Dante Quartet touch my heart and scare me at the same time? Or what makes Window Water Baby Moving touch in my soul that I smile like if it was my own baby borning? I know these are abstractional questions, but the point I want to reach is: How do you see the cinema made by Brakhage? How did Brakhage see his own cinema?

He also wrote a second paragraph, which I didn't completely understand, so after some exchanges revised it, and it fruther explains his meaning:

After rewatching the film, I've realized that the “deformations” that I wrote of come less from the Real exclusively than from the relation created by Brakhage between the Real and the filmic reality. Although there are cases where the distortions came from aspects external to the camera (the reflections in the window, the window itself that transfigures the buildings, etc.) there are also cases that depend on the camera and its aspects (the contrast between the pure black and the "sparkles" of light that compose the shots; the compositions of the shots; Brakhage's position in the space; the speed of the train, now contained on isolated and time-freeze films...) to exist. In a certain way, every film creates its own “filmic reality” or a “filmic Real,” but Brakhage, like most of the greatest filmmakers, was conscious of the differences between reality seen during the shooting of the film and the reality during the projection of it, and used this difference in his film."

I post our exchange here because his questions are good, and others ask them, and my site is sometimes visited by those new to Brakhage's work. I replied to the above thusly:

Now about Brakhage, I have been writing about his films for almost all of my life, starting when I was 18, trying, in part, to answer your question of what makes a Brakhage film a Brakhage film. It is not easy to answer. I don't think that is easy to answer about any good artist. It is very easy to answer about the bad ones. In fact, you may know of a book collecting almost all my writing on Brakhage? I can think of lots of reasons you should not purchase it, such as that even the ebook is probably very expensive in Reals, but I'm just letting you know about it. Some parts of the book are online, though, in various reviews linked to from my site, but the only link to The Wonder Ring appears to be broken, so:

You make a really excellent observation in noting that "the 'deformations' of the world came through reality itself." I do see that, and had written about it, but it certainly took me some time and many viewings to state it. Your ability to see and understand what is going on in films really impresses me. It's helpful here to know something about Brakhage's development. Some people say they prefer to see a filmmaker's films in the order in which they are made, and especially if the filmmaker is any good I think that is usually helpful. The Wonder Ring was only three years into Brakhage's filmmaking. He had never made a film like this before, and it was a big breakthrough for him. It was his first film that was both color and silent, which soon characterized most, but never all, of his later films. So it helps to see it that way. He began work partly influenced by film dramas — he himself mentioned Italian neo-realism — and struggled to find other ways of organizing a film than characters and story. Looking to base a film on more purely visual and rhythmic elements, it is natural that he would see, for example in window reflections and window distortions, ways forward, and also natural that he would begin his search for more abstract and musical rhythms with the movements of the train itself.

He may have also been influenced by the fact that the film was commissioned by a very great visual artist of collages and boxes, Joseph Cornell, who wanted a visual record of this elevated train line that was about to be demolished. I grew up in New York, and remember this line from my childhood; it cast deep shadows on Third Avenue, shrouding much of it in darkness, and those shadows also influenced a fine abstract painter, Franz Kline. It's worth trying to see some of Cornell's work online too, as imperfect as such viewing is.

I'm sure you're getting some of what Brakhage intended if you are scared by almost any of his films. Some are even more frightening to me, Fire of Waters being one example. He often said that if you want to understand him, you should know that he lived most of his life in terror. What was he afraid of? Who knows? We do know that his mother beat him when he was a child, and that surely is not all of it. I think in part he was afraid of any of the fixed structures of the world, whether the entirety of a narrative film, or some architecture, or his own dreams. The effects of The Dante Quartet depend on endless subtleties of light, color, and very fast rhythms, which I don't think can be fully analyzed.

His two most popular films have long been Window Water Baby Moving and Mothlight, and I feel sure that the human drama in the birth film is part of what touched you, and is part of what touches so many others. Feeling like it is you who are giving birth is a great response, but that also probably will not happen in most other Brakhage films.

By the way, Giovanni told me that he has found more than 60 online, though some in very poor copies, so if you have not found that many he might be able to help. And about poor copies, in 2009 most of the copies online were terrible. That was the year I was invited to present four program of Brakhage films in Rio de Janeiro. They were all shown on film. I was surprised by how many people came. It was a small theater, seating maybe 80, but was always almost full. I asked one of the people there how he had known to attend, since you could not see Brakhage films on film in Brazil, and he said that seeing the terrible YouTube copies was the reason; he knew that he wasn't seeing the films, but was intrigued enough to want to experience the real thing. That somewhat modified my opposition to seeing Brakhage films in bad copies. "Better than nothing," as is sometimes said in English.

About Brakhage's own views of his films, there is some truth to a remark P. Adams Sitney once made, that all the really important things about Brakhage's films have been said by Brakhage himself. There is an old cliche to the opposite effect, that if you want to understand an artist's work, the last person you should ask is the artist. There is some truth to that with Hollywood filmmakers; whatever I think is great in Howard Hawks's films, he never comes close to saying. Most artists of the last two hundred years or so are pretty conscious of what they are doing. Brakhage's first book on cinema, Metaphors on Vision, is about his own filmmaking practice, and the opening paragraph is cited very often, including by me, as one of his statements of purpose. I don't see the discussion of childhood seeing as being as important as his more general case, trying to see things not by their names (or, I would add, by their customary uses) but as "adventures in perception." I sometimes tell students when introducing Brakhage that he once said at one of his screenings something like, "If one person comes out of this screening and sees the street in a new way, I will be happy." He wanted to give everyone new ways to see. In a class like that, I sometimes start talking about the desk I am sitting at as I speak to the class: "It looks bland and boring, but start changing your angle of view a bit, and you will see that the light reflects on it differently; bring your eyes close the surface, and you will notice details you had been unaware of before," and so on.

Three other statements of Brakhage's might be helpful.

In one, he is asked at one of his screenings something like, 'Isn't the purpose of films to communicate?" At least in English, and in that context, "communication" is seen as something that happens only in one direction: the artist "communicates," and the viewer receives. You already understood that that is nowhere near adequate for his films, in that you felt like a participant in Window Water Baby Moving More generally, one of my main arguments for his work is that it makes the viewer into an active participant, partly through its formal and aesthetic complexities, giving the viewer the experience not of the passive observer that is encouraged by mainstream cinema (some of whose examples are hugely more complex than that, if you probe further), but as an explorer, a navigator, sailing through the unknown waters of new ways of seeing and new levels of consciousness that his films present for us.

The studio heads in early Hollywood were not known for being intellectually brilliant. An old joke about them was, "They only two-syllable word they know is 'fillum'" — and I sometimes like to jokingly use "fiillum" for my recent films. One idea that some people, such as critics, offered to Hollywood is that instead of just making mindless entertainments, they should also make socially aware films, "message pictures." They did make a few some. But one of the studio bosses replied, "When I want to send a message, I call Western Union." Western Union was a company that sent telegrams, back then delivered by hand when many did not have phones and when long distance calling was very expensive. But I think his point is a good one, even if he meant it to justify superficial musicals (though some musicals are quite great). A telegram works in one direction, and not as a way of starting a conversation. You can send a telegram in reply, but it would short and expensive.

Brakhage's own answer to the question, which often had the hidden meaning that "I didn't get anything out of your films," was to tell a love story, I believe about him and his wife and his wife's parents, who helped support them in their early years. It was essentially that "communication" is hard, and characterizes the kinds of exchanges he had with her parents, and what he preferred was the inter-subjective relationship with his wife, which was one of love. Now as a husband and a lover he was surely flawed, but I think his metaphor is still good: both art viewing and love are interdependent, back-and-forth processes.

Other statements of his have proved helpful to me over the years. In one, he attacked the so-called "structural films," including Michael Snow and even referencing Peter Kubelka, whose films he thought were very great. He objected to what he saw as the mechanical predictability of some of them, the way they filled out an overall predetermined pattern. Since my number one dogma about all art is that anything can be great, I don't agree with his objection at all, but important to me in coming to understand any art is to understand that artists often advocate, and in their work but sometimes also in speaking or writing, for their own ways of seeing and making above all others, which is only natural if they feel they have found a way that is true to them. For most artists, I think it is necessary to carve out a narrow path. You mentioned Vertov's writings, and they are one excellent example. I don't read them and think, "I should stop loving the films of John Ford," but rather, that he is staking out for himself a way of working that necessarily excludes other ways, and there are good reasons for him, or any artist. to do so.

Anyway, in attacking structural film, Brakhage attacked the predetermined and somewhat predictable nature of many of them by saying something close to, "What I am trying to do is to make films about what I don't know." That is I think really helpful. This is one reason why someone navigating Brakhage's films may at times feel terror: they are journeying into the unknown. The best example of all this can be found in the Arabics, which you may find one or two of online, but this search informs most of his films. Almost all of his mature films, though, are characterized by irregular and unpredictable forms, in shooting and in editing. Just when it seems like a pattern has been established, at the very moment when you feel you recognize it, he turns around and replaces it with something different.

Another point to understand is that he thought his films, and those of some of his colleagues, could change the world. This was the utopianism of the 1960s, which continued somewhat into the 1970s, but I think was brought to a crashing-down with the election of a mediocre Hollywood movie actor, Ronald Reagan, as president in 1980. Late in his life, Brakhage referred to his failed dream that "we" could change the world.

Dscovering Markopoulos and Brakhage at 15 or 16, I shared that feeling, seeing that anyone's awareness could be expanded and altered by coming to love such films. Of course, this was long before their techniques had been copied endlessly in music videos, television commercials, and by mediocre "experimental" filmmakers, so that they no longer seemed surprising. I still think that art can change you profoundly, as I argued in the last section of Our Flattening Culture, but most don't care to give it the needed attention. In the case of Brakhage, of course, multiple viewings are a must.

Finally, there is also this statement of his, recounted in the first paragraph of the text linked to. In some ways, this could be the profoundest of all of them. His films are never stable, always changing. They reflect the terror of an endangered child unable to find a resting place for his consciousness, and thus always seeking alternatives, and through his own efforts, finding beauty. But the beauty itself is always fragile, like a spider's web spun over darkness, or, in his own phrase, "a snail's trail in the moonlight." There is the fragility of someone who always lives at the edge of what we know of as ordinary existence, one might even say of consciousness itself, and who is always looking over the edge, as of into the unknown, terrified of and attracted to falling off.

Miguel then replied:

"They are journeying into the unknown", that's exactly what I felt watching Window Water and Dante Quartet. I felt that I was falling into an endless well of memories, frighting, death, nostalgia. Something familiar and unknown at the same time - a feeling that I have felt since I was a kid, and I'm feeling right now.

About his attack on the "predictability" of structural films, I also disagree, but with another opinion, at least to one structural film - Arnulf Rainer. I don't think that Arnulf Rainer is predictable because the rhythm between black and white varies several times. For example: 2 white, 2 black shots; three white shots, one black shot; one white shot, one black shot, etc. Not even considering sound! It's something that I want to reach in my next movie, or maybe the next other. I strongly agree with you on the objections of each artist, that we don't need to be "Papagaios" (A slang term in the Portuguese language that refers to people who repeat what they have heard from others, like the birds called Papagaios) when we hear the thoughts or read the writings of a specific artist. I recently saw a short video where Brakhage said that "Godard is a fad who'll be forgotten in 15 years". In comparison, Tarkovsky once said that Brakhage's movies were "too scientific to be considered art"*(maybe Stan saw structural films that way?). We just need to understand why they seem art in one way and not another.