This, an early work which I had assumed destroyed, was discovered in 1995 (by someone who wishes to remain anonymous) and thus is available for “tone poem” time-travel to the ‘50s. (SB)

On a theme suggested by Joseph Cornell. A sharp change in Brakhage’s work, we see New York’s Third Avenue EI (since demolished) as though through the eyes of a child on a merry-go-round.

This begins the fourth chapter of “The Book of Film” and entertains directly the considerations of chapter two (“THE WEIR-FaLCON SAGA,” “The Machine of Eden,” and “The Animals of Eden and After”). Person begins to be defined by what it is not. It might be said that chapter one (“Scenes from Under Childhood”) set forth birth and being, chapter two – consciousness, chapter three (“Sincerity”) – self-consciousness; thus “Soldier and Other Cosmic Objects” begins that strictly philosophical task of distinguishing (from, in this case, the rituals and trials of public school). I like to think of it as a work that Ludwig Wittgenstein might have found more enjoyable. (SB)

Here are four films in contemplation upon those events, which are so centered upon one moment that chronology seems almost obliterated or at least unimportant in remembrance. Most animals seem, to me, to inhabit this eventuality as a norm. I was permitted to share such experience, camera in hand, with several creatures these four non-times; but it was the memory of those experiences which made it possible to edit a formal equivalent for the continuity art of film. (Stan Brakhage)

A thin oval of green-tinged light in thick darkness persists, then gradually descends below the bottom of the frame and, after a pause, rises again to its original position. Out of the surrounding darkness a figure slowly emerges, a woman in a purple robe who moves with stately steps back and forth across the screen, finally fully apparent in the “line” (or circle) of light. She throws off her robe and appears in her white shift, lies prone upon the floor, then rises into a dance of rhythmic postures which subside to a kneeling and bound-down position from which she retrieves her robe, enrobes herself again, circles the “pool” of light and is obliterated by four yellow flashes of light (simultaneously, at the four corners of the frame). Out of the darkness there appears the close-up of the upper face and fixed eyes of a young man (Charles Boultenhouse) whose blinking gaze is intercut with the figure of the torso, head and arms of a male dancer with whitened ringlets of hair superimposed with right-to-left leaps of his legs and by up-reaching fingers which surround the dancer, finally, and mimic his own hand gestures. This is interrupted by flashes of a golden facemask, which obliterates the dancer and is swiftly intercut with a purple circle surrounded by red, which ends the film. (This material was found in boxes of unfinished film projects which Charles Boultenhouse -and presumably Parker Tyler- worked with in the 1950s-1960s. Anna Duncan, one of the “Isadorables” adopted, as well as trained in childhood, by Isadora Duncan was discovered working with Charles in Brentano’s bookstore: he felt compelled to preserve this lineage of Duncan, perhaps the greatest dancer innovator of the 20th century- certainly the most famous. While the film was never finished, certainly this section, as well as the following self-portraiture, speaks for itself.)