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How to watch Dog Star Man: Part IV
1964 · Stan Brakhage · Dog Star Man: Part IV on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera fall and tumble with the man. (camera)
When the woodsman loses his footing, the camera goes down too, losing focus and finding only smears of sky and ground, with no steady shot afterward.
Payoff: Brakhage used the camera as a limb, not an instrument, so the fall happens to the image itself.
Count how few frames some shots seem to last. (cutting)
Brakhage cut the film by hand at one, two, and three frames at a time, so the rhythm hits you as pulse rather than as readable shots.
Payoff: You are watching in a unit smaller than a shot, the single frame, rather than a story. In the reading: engramme/photogramme. Deleuze calls this unit the gramme, or photogramme: a film built out of single frames rather than out of shots.
Notice extreme close-ups that erase any sense of scale. (camera)
A patch of skin, a mountainside, and a shard of stained glass are all shot so close that you cannot tell how big any of them actually is.
Payoff: Losing scale is how the film makes a body, a mountain, and a window equally interchangeable.
Listen for the total absence of any soundtrack. (sound)
The film is silent by design, not by budget, so nothing outside the cutting itself sets your sense of rhythm or time.
Payoff: With no music pulling you along, the cutting alone has to be the only meter you follow.
Watch images of birth, fire, and the sun recur. (structure)
A newborn, a nursing breast, a fire, and the sun keep reappearing among shots of a mountainside and a stained-glass saint, without any of them being explained.
Payoff: These images rhyme with each other instead of following one another, so meaning builds by echo, not by plot.
Once you have seen it
Track how many separate layers of image are running at once. (cutting)
Part IV superimposes four rolls of film simultaneously, so no single image is ever alone on screen, each one figure and ground for the others at once.
Payoff: No one can watch four simultaneous strands and truly resolve them; a second look reveals different rhymes than the first. In the reading: the Open. Deleuze calls this the Open: the sense that what's framed is only a slice of a whole duration you can never fully take in.
Notice the one frozen, posed image in a film that has none. (cutting)
The stained-glass saint is the single traditional, iconic pose the film contains, and Brakhage runs it past you in fragments at the same rate as a nipple or a stump.
Payoff: The one image built to be held still is not held still here; the film treats it exactly like everything else. In the reading: privileged-instants. Deleuze calls a posed, held image like that a privileged instant, the very thing the film's frame-by-frame rhythm refuses to grant it.
Notice the same event repeated at wildly different scales. (structure)
A solar flare and a close-up of skin or blood vessels are cut together as if they were the same action, just magnified differently.
Payoff: The film is arguing, without a word, that the sun and a body run on the same event.
Carry this in: Watch it twice. What rhymes the second time will not be what rhymed the first.