Stan Brakhage | Interim / 1952

doomed love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Brakhage (scenarist and director) Interim / 1952

 

Stan Brakhage’s first from 1952, Interim, might easily be sloughed off as a minor love story featuring a short series of on-screen smooches. But, in fact, this short work is a far deeper study in social and cultural strictures and class differences, as well as a kind of exploration of a first heterosexual encounter from a sexually unsure man.

      The obviously bored and confused boy (Walter Necomb) stands on a busy bridge built over an industrial wasteland of a city. In the distance we can see a few skyscrapers, obviously suggesting the heart of the city, which he has, at least temporarily, left behind. Cars speed back and forth across the bridge as the youth looks over the barren landscape, apparently having an unsettling effect, particular given the music score by Brakhage’s friend James Tenney.

      On the bridge, one driver, perhaps districted by the handsome blond-haired boy, screeches to a momentary stop, waking the teenager up from the trance-like state of so many early experimental works, obviously influenced by Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950)—although expressed even earlier in Joseph Vogel’s 1947 short work, House of Cards and the several gay “coming out” films of Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, and Willard Maas of the late 1940s and early 50s.

     A bit confused by his possible endangerment, the young man determines to follow the many-tiered stairway attached to the bridge to the unknown world below.

     In this barren, but architecturally fascinating underworld, the young man wanders without having any apparent goa, simply following the kind of vaulted underground “hallway” the bridges’ support system provides, which at moments suggests the inside of a vast cathedral.

     Without even knowing it, a young girl (Janic Hubka) is standing alone await in this wasteland. Why she is there, and who she might be waiting for is not revealed; but it is clear that in this lower world there are also nearby streets and homes, to which probably she belongs.

     Seeing the handsome boy enter her world, she follows along with him on a parallel course, without his being able to discern her presence. Yet when he comes to a barrier that holds back passersby from the railroad tracks, he suddenly notes her existence, and she quickly comes toward him. Within moments they have together ducked under the barrier, but just as quickly return to the arched “hallway,” where they wander now together.

     Suddenly the industrial wasteland is slightly transformed into a kind of untamed natural world, as Brakhage shows us a small stream, popular trees, birds, and other insects. As the two enter this “natural” world, strangely existing simultaneously with the junk dropped there by the society above, they perceive that a storm is brewing, and the rain quickly begins its steady beat.

     In this world, moreover, we observe Brakhage’s camera focusing on the minutiae of water ripples, clouds, peeling paint, and other phenomena that will a few years later become the subject matter of his films as opposed to people in a landscape.

   At first, the couple seems to have nowhere to go, as they try to wait out the storm beneath a tree. But they soon spot a barren shack into which they hurry as the rain grows more fearsome. Within the shack, they reach out to one another, briefly touching, and, finally, in a short and sudden frenzy intensely kiss.

     Soon after, the storm passes and they break away from one another, the young man taking the lead in moving out of the darkened spot in which they had momentarily taken refuge. The girl, a bit shaken, follows, but clearly realizes that the brief moment of passion between them—and anything it might have offered her regarding a way out of the world in which she is entrapped—is over. It was a mere interim, something between another, temporary and disposable as her world seems to be. Brakhage, in fact, has made this clear from the beginning by presenting both figures in a slight blur, their reality even for one another being somewhat under question.

     Afterwards, she leads the young man, taking him once again to the barrier, under which, this time, she ducks, before being forced to wait between the tracks for the passing of a train.

   As she looks back with a wistful smile, she observes that the boy turned to leave, making his way gradually back to the stairway and returning to his obviously socially superior world where his entire life seems much less determined and committed.

     The brief relationship between them, quite obviously, has been doomed before it started. If the girl might have wished for something more, for the bored and slightly confused boy it was nothing but a moment in his life, which gives this early version of speed dating almost a tragic quality. Did he even like what he briefly tried out?

     The poor girl, moreover, is doomed by the world in which we find her, a society apparently inferior to that to which the bridge leads, an urban space with people with the financial means to live in high rises atop one another. Where the boy stands in relation to these two worlds is indeterminate, apparently even in his own mind.

     The film announces its end. Yet it continues, repeating the original title frame and the earliest scenes with the boy on the bridge staring down into the wasteland, another image of him making his way down the staircase, and yet another repeat of the automobile that comes to a crash near him, all of which makes the experiences he have just witnessed even more ephemeral as if they might be a thing of his imagination or, perhaps, an event he wishes to repeat.

     It is particularly disturbing when we experience the car coming to squeal of a halt once more, stopping near him without moving just before he had, in the original scene, descended into the world below. Why has the car stopped so ominously close to him? Does the person or people inside know him? Have they stopped to pick him up or abduct him? Brakhage provides no answer, but in repeating the incident, he obviously wants us to think about what made this young man undertake his actual or imaginative voyage. Was it a temporary escape? And if so, from whom and what? From a different kind of life, a way of behavior, a sexuality? All we know is that he does return from the interim reality or fantasy to the bridge where he now must face whoever has come to a halt before him. Has he, all along, been waiting for the car to arrive, just as the girl in the world below must wait for the train to pass so she might return to wherever it was she had come.

    Like Orpheus he turns back, once again, to observe the car. Perhaps, it is not the wasteland that is hell, but the world connected to the bridge, and like Orpheus he has lost his Eurydice forever. Or perhaps the director is using the word “interim” in its archaic meaning of “meanwhile,” indicating something occurring at the very same time as another. Meanwhile…we’re back into the real world where there is no girl waiting for him, no possibility of encountering the remnants of a natural world, no love possible, at least not of the innocent kind that the girl represents.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).