Douglas Messerli | Four Early Films of Stan Brakhage (Note)

four early films of stan brakhage

by Douglas Messerli

 

There is nothing overtly gay or homosexual about any of these four early films by the heterosexual director Stan Brakhage.

     But these works, the earliest Interim made when he was only 19, present a very tenuous and intense relationship between males and males and females in general, and at moments seem to engage with characters who are not yet quite sure what to make of sex or even gender. All of the central figures of these works are outsiders to the worlds in which they suddenly find themselves and to one another.

     Moreover, there is a strange sense of alienation, both social and sexual, in these works that leave us with a sense of the figures attempts in their various gatherings to explore their sexualities, whether or not they perceive themselves as heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, or in the case of The Extraordinary Child simply confused by the macho world into which he has recently been born.

    There is also a strong sense in these clearly juvenile works (a couple of which Brakhage at various times as to be removed from his list works) of exploring some of his major influences which include Myra Deren, Marie Menken, Willard Maas, John Cage, Robert Duncan, and other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Both Deren and Menken, deep experimentalists, explored the body and sexuality, both straight and gay in their works; Maas, Cage, and Duncan were actively gay. These were the very figures with whom Brakhage was meeting and, in Deren’s case, actually living in her apartment during the years, 1953 and 1954, in which these films were made. Brakhage himself cited Menken: "If there is one single filmmaker that I owe the most to for the crucial development of my own film making it would be Marie Menken.” Menken was married to Maas and is said to have taught Andy Warhol how to use the Bolex camera.

    Perhaps even more importantly, we see in these works the influence of another 1950s experimentalist, the French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, particularly his Orpheus of 1950.

    If nothing else, these very issues of societal and sexual norms would become major themes of s in Brakhage’s later films, although rarely approached so ambiguously.

    What these works generally have in common is a recognition of the enormous anxiety and angst among the young men and women of the early 1950s, which compels them into often temporary and uncomfortable sexual and social relations. These early films, despite Brakhage’s own dismissal of them, are important because they show us those very issues which would later become even more apparent in his later, resolved through art itself, an art free from storytelling and reportage, an art that sought to completely transform these more everyday worldly problems. It one truly wanted to see, he must perhaps blind himself to what he had been taught to see, discovering a whole new world in the process.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).