“One aspect of the film’s ambition is perhaps to extend the metaphor of film-as-music from the familiar brief lyric…into the equivalent of a feature-length movie, or saga, the subject of which is a family maturing and dividing.” – A.L. Rees, British Film Institute While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” Coming upon the following passage in her book, he found renewed energy to continue and complete the work: “Why should she give birth, though she had worked in a pottery, to an urn, to a stone angel, to the face of a cracked sundial? Why should she be, she screamed, this common clay, this tortured dust?” From “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” by Marguerite Young… to whom this film is gratefully dedicated.

“One aspect of the film’s ambition is perhaps to extend the metaphor of film-as-music from the familiar brief lyric…into the equivalent of a feature-length movie, or saga, the subject of which is a family maturing and dividing.” – A.L. Rees, British Film Institute While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” Coming upon the following passage in her book, he found renewed energy to continue and complete the work: “Why should she give birth, though she had worked in a pottery, to an urn, to a stone angel, to the face of a cracked sundial? Why should she be, she screamed, this common clay, this tortured dust?” From “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” by Marguerite Young… to whom this film is gratefully dedicated.

“One aspect of the film’s ambition is perhaps to extend the metaphor of film-as-music from the familiar brief lyric…into the equivalent of a feature-length movie, or saga, the subject of which is a family maturing and dividing.” – A.L. Rees, British Film Institute While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” Coming upon the following passage in her book, he found renewed energy to continue and complete the work: “Why should she give birth, though she had worked in a pottery, to an urn, to a stone angel, to the face of a cracked sundial? Why should she be, she screamed, this common clay, this tortured dust?” From “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” by Marguerite Young… to whom this film is gratefully dedicated.

In “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son,” I rephotographed a 1905 short film. I wanted to show the actual present of the film, just to begin to indicate its energy. A train of images passes, like enough and different enough to imply to the mind that its eyes are seeing an arm lift, or a door close; I wanted to “bring to the surface” that multi-rhythmic collision contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force-areas struggling edge for identity of shape…to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself – a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still… stirred to life by a successive 16-24 fps patterning on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion. (KJ)

“‘Shade’ is a near exhaustion of the possibilities between camera (aperture, focus) and nature (sun, wind). It is a beautiful study-poem on the undying presence that renders the world perceptually. In this minimal area, the variations are pursued with quiet doggedness, each frame revealing the secret of the next.” – Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb

An experimental narrative moving across inner borders and inner edges.

Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a French chemist who gave the first accurate scientific explanation of the mysteries of fire. He also proved the law of conservation of matter, which states that matter can be neither created nor destroyed. His work and this film are situated between modern chemistry and alchemy. The film stages a drama of abstraction and theoretical realism. La vie quotidenne seen photo-chemically and musically. This film is a materialist projected-image conservation of matter. (MS)