Stan Brakhage | Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection / 1953

projections upon a landscape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Brakhage (scenarist and director) Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection / 1953

 

If Brakhage’s first film Interim in some respects presents itself a bit like a film of the French New Wave, in his second film,* Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection, Brakage presents us with a glimpse of what Michelangelo Antonioni might have done if were an American.

     Just as in Antonioni’s 1960 masterwork, L’Avventura a group of what appear to be fairly well-off teenagers are gathered together in a car on their way to an outing. Just outside a picturesque old Colorado mining town plant, however, their car breaks down, and one by one, the males pile out to inspect the engine, obviously none of them with the ability to fix it. One girl (Yvonne Fair) suggests to the others that they explore the plant, while the driver heads off in the other direction to seek help.

     Almost the moment they begin to explore the several mining buildings, which have all lost their windows to poachers, one boy and a girl (Walter Newcomb and Eva Neuman) break off from the others. The male of this duo, clearly disinterested in his companions, opens a book, and, sitting alone on a high beam above begins to read, serving symbolically as a kind of objective observer. The girl, clearly fearing to explore, tentatively follows him. From the beginning we perceive that her interests are in the rocks, flowers, and other objects, not in the buildings. She is also fearful of even entering the myriads of rotting barns and sheds.

     Meanwhile the dominant woman (Fair) goes off with the two handsome boys, ready to investigate nearly every building, and within some of searching out the open doors and the rooms within.

     From the beginning, however, we sense a kind of tension between these two males (Larry Jordan and Taggart Deike); it may be that they both are interested in the girl, but we also suspect a possible homoerotic attraction between the two, a relationship that the director hints at by posing them in a single shot, one (Deike), in a dark coat, facing straight out at the camera, as he enters the building and moves toward the other boy (Jordan), wearing a lighter coat, looking off into space. The boys are not only aware of each other’s presence, but there is a deep sense of attraction or least interest in each other. When Jordan’s character drops his cigarettes from the box he his taken out, the other quickly bends down to help him gather them up, handing them over to him slowly in what almost becomes an offering, a momentary rapprochement, an instant of possible touch. 

     As we watch this image, however, the girl who has gone on without them to explore the space above, comes swinging from overhead into view between them, almost as if she were attempting to divert their intense stares.

     Whether or not the tension between them is based on a heterosexual macho competitiveness or a darker fear of their inner feelings for one another, it is quite clear that the uneasiness we sense between the two may, at any moment, break out in either violence or and embrace.

    The fearless girl moves of even further in her explorations, at one point a beam snapping under foot, making it quite clear that it is dangerous to walk these old floors and creep among their walkways.

   Suddenly as she enters a room filled with derelict machinery, she experiences a dizzying sensation seemingly (not unlike the feeling Mrs. Moore experiences in the Marabar caves in E. M. Forester’s A Passage to India) upon encountering a huge waterwheel that obviously once sifted the ore out from the other ingredients. She momentarily pulls back, and then screams out (I must remind the reader this is a silent film) in terror, bringing all the others to her on the run. What she has witnessed or what has made her cry out is unclear, but the very possibility of danger clearly elevates the level male testosterone in evidence as the two begin to fight. As the two men and even the boy who had been reading, the latter slow to arrive because of his retrieval of the book which has fallen, gather round her, we can see Jordan’s character trying to comfort her and discover the reason for her scream, while soon after we can see the other mouth the words, “That’s disgusting.” What he finds so abhorrent about her report is not revealed, but it is clear the other boy feels the need to protect the girl from the other’s dismissal and begins to argue and wrestle the other.

    The passive, perhaps queer bookish boy, observing the male rivalry being performed before him, is clearly dismissive, and goes even further afield to seek out privacy, while the shy girl meekly follows.

     The battling duo are within inches of killing one another until the adventuresome girl intrudes, the boys backing off, Deike’s character walking away, the other, who has now a bloody lip, following behind almost as if he were attempting to apologize—or is it, possibly, to actually declare his love for the other. We might almost suspect the latter, but the one in the darker interprets it as still another challenge, fiercely turning upon him now with a timber in hand, pushing him away and then beating him with the wooden weapon until he is dead. He stands for a long while in horror and shock for what he has just done.

    The reader and the frightened girl meanwhile, have left the building, returning to the world outside, Brakhage, just as he had in Interim, focusing on the poplar trees and the clouds. The lead woman soon follows them, the two women, heading in seemingly opposite directions, now calling out for something, apparently the two boys.

     The young murderer finally snapping out of his trance, begins to climb in a manner similar, once more, to the several gay confessional narratives, particularly Harrington’s Picnic (1948), wherein the male seeing the woman being carried off, climbs an endless progression of steps that seem to never end. So too does the man dressed in a darker coat climb ladders that seem without end. But finally, he pauses and turns, from there either falling or leaping to his death.

    As in Antonioni’s work the others move on through nature calling to the others without a clue to where they might have disappeared, almost as if they have forgotten everything that had occurred within the buildings of broken windows, or as if they hadn’t seen in the strange mix of half-light and reflection what we believe we experienced.

    I rather like the off-handed comment by Alex Good, in his generally clueless remarks about this film, “I find it a haunting and suggestive film, its sense of closure provided by an evocative persistence of vision. It’s an origin myth for a ghost story. You can bet that the driver isn’t going to find anybody when he comes back. They will have all become shades.” That would make if far too much of narrative, however, even for Brakhage’s sophomore work. It is much more likely that these characters are a psychological projection onto a landscape, as I have suggested for Interim.

 

*Although on some lists The Boy and The Sea is listed as Brahkage’s second film, most scholars today think that this film was either lost, or even more likely, never fully filmed.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).