Elementary Phrases

This is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed collaboration between filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon. After many months of working together step-printing the painted strips of film by Brakhage, Phil Solomon re-discovered the following passage which helped clarify their process and inspired the editing wich then began: “The profound nature of this concept will be better understood, and the positive study of it more successful, if we think of such an organization, in its temporal aspect and scope, as corresponding exactly to what is called in music the phrasing; distinguished both from the melody (which is based on the differences of pitch) and from the rhythm (based on the repetition of an arsis-thesis system). Like rhythm it is based on facts of intensity (nuances) even while its form is extended over a dimension analogous to that of melody. “Whoever distinctly grasps these ideas will feel the importance of what we must call the phrasing of a picture, and for example, the stylistic importance of the differences observable between the slow, full, majestic phrasing of a Veronese (that of Tintoretto is more suave with equal plenitude), the rugged phrasing of Caravaggio (powerful in its boldness, brutal, even a bit melodramatic), the essentially polyphonic and architectonic phrasing of N. Poussin, or again the pathetic and tormented phrasing of Delacroix. It is entirely reasonable to note a likeness with these characteristics in the music of Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, or Berlioz.” – “Time in the Plastic Arts” by Etienne Souriau, from Reflections on Art, edited by Susan K. Langer.