There are several useful skills I learned from Stan Brakhage’s work, like “how he creates episodic timing, broken gaps in non-linear movement, focusing on details and then pulling back to create emptyness" in his work.
1. Mothlight
For example, his "Mothlight" (1963) is a literal recreation of the moth movement and vision made by sealing moth's wings, flowers, blades of grass, etc. between strips of clear film.
As Brakhage himself put it: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?
Also the way he paints over photographed imagery is pretty interesting too
2. The Dante Quartet
The Dante Quartet (1987), in the "Purgation" segment, colors and images collide with and grind against each other, and in "Existence Is Song," contrasting colors, moonscapes, and volcanoes burst forth like an acre of flowers blooming.
3. Stellar
Brakhage, with deft sensitivity and imagination, re-produces the difference between Being and beings in the films Stellar (1993), for these films, while one might refer to them as light and color studies, are more aptly conceived in terms of the glaring absence of light, these films are dominated by the intrusion of Chaos and night on the subject’s conscious efforts to establish a terrestrial grounding amidst the groundless chasm of Being. Brakhage remarks about Stellar that it is “a visual envisioning of outer space,” and the void plays a dominant role in this film, for while brilliant, fleeting flashes of luminescent celestial forms emerge, are born, in a variety of brilliant hues, they just as quickly “burn out” as they are extinguished and consumed by the abyss from out of which they arose.
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