Stan Brakhage | The Way to Shadow Garden / 1954

learning how to see

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Brakhage (scenarist and director) The Way to Shadow Garden / 1954

 

One might argue that the agitation and angst of the young US male we saw so apparent in his first three films, Interim, Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection, and The Extraordinary Child  comes to a head, quite literally, in this 1954 last narrative film.

     The Way to Shadow Garden demonstrates that through this film the director moved into a new vision of filmmaking that focused less on the narrative of those inner desperations and looked instead to an entirely new vision of the world. It is almost as if, in this work, Brakhage found a way through the classical tragedy of Sophocles’s Oedipus and the romantic surrealism Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus and, particularly in this case, The Blood of the Poet to break with American realism in a manner that takes him out of Plato’s cave into a different kind of reality, a “shadow garden” as he describes it, a vision of the mind instead of the mere illusions flashed upon the wall.

    Narrative, coherence, logic, even order are no longer necessary to get to the essence of life, a new vision of nature that had been around us all along without us truly being able to see it.

    The film begins with its only character (again played by Walter Newcomb) returning to his apartment amidst what sounds like nuclear bombs exploding around him. This film is scored only with mouth noises,* which soon shift to earie horror movie sounds, lamp shades and other objects beginning to sway of themselves. It appears as if the young man were almost humming to himself to keep away the horrific world around him.

     Yet despite the fact that he closes up the windows, he is clearly terrified, as the IMDb title synopsis describes it, he is clearly “agitated and distraught.”

        At one point he takes a few sips of water before tossing over his entire face as it might serve as either a bracer or relaxant. He puts up a forced smile as he removes his coat and looses his tie.

   He removes his shirt, lights a cigarette, attempts to read a book (reminding us of the same actor’s portrayal of the reader in Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection), but nothing seems to help. Even his bedsheet with its creases of where his body has laid the night before terrifies him as if he sees there his loneliness and, as critic P. Adams Sitney, sensed, hours of masturbation. It is as if all the tensions of Brakhage’s first three movies have come together in this moment. He is caught as all the figures of those films have been in what Sitney describes as a kind of trance.

   Yet suddenly, finding everything unbearable the young man impulsively does something that is the next thing to suicide, he gouges out his eyes, blood pouring from them.

 

    Strangely, a kind of calm descends upon both the character and the film, as the young man opens the doors of his apartment that now lead to a world in reverse negative of the one we previously witnessed. Here is a garden of lovely flowers playing out before our eyes drained of color but the screen still filled with the patterns of their shape and forms.

    It is as if this young man has walked through Cocteau’s Orphean mirror to discover, as I suggest above, something previously unavailable to his imagination, a beauty that does not lie in the detritus of daily reality, but exists outside of the worldly problems which Brakhage’s young men and women have been facing in his works to date. Like the young man and girl momentarily discovering nature in the urban wasteland in Interim and the women and bookish boy being embraced by the woods in Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection, this young man has finally made it “through” to a world of new perceptions the free him, at least momentarily, from the social, sexual, political, and psychological dilemmas he has previously been facing.

   Narrative and the human figure located in social space will still appear from time to time in Brakhage’s films after this, but the focus will be on abstraction, beauty in shape, form, and color perceived as a release from dross reality of the everyday life satirized in The Extraordinary Child.

     This is surely a kind of personal coming through and coming out movie as were Maya Deren’s, Curtis Harrington’s, Kenneth Anger’s, Gregory Markopoulos’, and Willard Mass’ queer coming out films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and likely was influenced by them.

    

*Brakhage originally wanted to use Varèse's Ionisation as the soundtrack, but the composer did not own the rights and, accordingly, could not grant them to the filmmaker.

    I speak of the sound of nuclear bombs because during this very same period the US and other nations were obsessed with the terrors of what had happened at the end of World War II with bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout the early 1950s school children regular underwent simulated preparations for just bombings, being sent into the halls or basements of schools and being tested for possible radiation. I remember these well in my early elementary school days.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).