Dog Star Man: Part IV · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Halfway through Part IV the woodsman loses his footing on the mountainside and goes down. The camera goes down with him. It doesn't film the fall from a safe position; it takes the fall, tumbling, losing focus, finding a smear of sky and then a smear of ground, and nobody cuts to a steady shot afterward to explain what happened.

That's the whole film in one gesture. Brakhage shot Dog Star Man on a spring-wound Bolex H16, a 16mm camera light enough to hold in one hand, swing, or strap to your body, and he used it as a limb rather than an instrument. When the man goes down, the picture goes down.

So why bring Deleuze to six silent minutes of a man with an axe?

Because Deleuze's cinema books start from a strange proposition that Brakhage happened to be trying to photograph. Deleuze takes it from Bergson: before there's a person looking at a world, there's just matter acting on matter, light striking light — an image-universe with no center and no privileged viewpoint. Deleuze calls this the plane of immanence, and he thinks the camera is the one machine that can get near it, because a camera doesn't have to organize what it receives around a human standing upright with two eyes at a fixed height. Brakhage, in Metaphors on Vision (in print by 1963, while he was still shooting the cycle), asked for exactly that: an eye "unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic." Two people describing the same condition from opposite ends. One wanted to build it. The other, later, had the words for it.

The words get finer. Deleuze sorts film perception into three states, borrowing from chemistry. Solid perception is the ordinary kind: a person sees objects at human scale and acts on them. Liquid perception belongs to the French silent school, where everything flows and superimposes and the image rides currents. Gaseous perception goes down to the molecular level, where the unit of the film is no longer the shot but the single frame; Deleuze names its sign the gramme, or photogramme. It's the least intuitive of the three, and it's what Part IV runs on. Brakhage cut this by hand at a rewind bench, and shots of one, two and three frames are common. The Bolex has a single-frame release and he used it. He painted and scratched directly on the emulsion, so some frames aren't photographs of anything at all. At twenty-four frames a second none of this is legible as picture. It registers as pulse.

A frame is not a small shot. Once the frame becomes the unit, the film stops sampling the world at the moments that supposedly matter — the decisive gesture, the climactic pose — and samples it at every equidistant instant, indifferently. Deleuze calls that the any-instant-whatever, and treats it as cinema's founding break from the older arts, which had to choose the one posed attitude that would stand for all the rest. Part IV puts the old way on screen exactly once: a stained-glass saint, the sacred image frozen in the single privileged pose that iconography exists to fix. Brakhage runs it past you in fragments, at the same rate as a nipple, a stump, a fire. The privileged instant isn't refuted. It's swallowed.

Density is what separates this part from the rest of the cycle. Part I moves largely in one strand; Part IV runs four at once, so no image is ever alone and every element is figure and ground simultaneously. Deleuze's name for the school that made superimposition and maximal mobility into a method is the quantitative montage of the French. The direct debt here is Ballet Mécanique (1924), which handed Brakhage two devices he uses together: prismatic lens attachments that shatter one object into kaleidoscopic multiples, and cutting governed by descending frame counts, so rhythm accelerates on its own schedule no matter what's depicted.

The other debt is Eisenstein, and what Brakhage does with it is the sharpest decision in the film. From October he takes metric and overtonal montage — shot lengths cut to a handful of frames until pulse rather than proposition carries the passage. Then he throws away the dialectic. Eisenstein collided shots to produce a third thing, a concept, in your head. Brakhage collides them to produce a rate. The shock is kept; the thesis is dropped. If you've ever wondered where montage went after the political avant-garde stopped believing in itself, this is one of the places.

The film also splices in footage nobody in that cabin shot: solar observatory material, microphotography of cells and vessels. L'Hippocampe (1934) is the precedent that made laboratory microcinematography usable as expressive texture instead of illustration, and Brakhage takes the permission the whole distance. A solar prominence and a capillary are cut as the same event at two magnifications. This is where the film reaches for what Deleuze calls the Open: the sense that the framed set is a slice of a whole that's changing, and that the whole isn't a bigger container but a duration everything shares. A man swinging an axe. A baby crawling. The sun burning. Same event, different scale. The film doesn't say it. It rhymes it.

Meanwhile the space comes apart, deliberately. The close-ups abolish scale cues so thoroughly that a patch of skin, a mountainside and a shard of stained glass become formally interchangeable. No establishing shots, no eyelines, no spatial contract at all. Deleuze's term for space that has stopped serving as a setting for action and become a set of disconnected affective patches is the any-space-whatever; he usually finds it in emptied or fragmented modern places, and it's odd and useful to find it here in a mountain landscape shot from three inches away. What's left standing in those patches are intensities rather than things: fire, red, glare, the saturated contrast of reversal stock pushed and solarized. Deleuze would call that a quality-power — a quality presented for itself rather than as the property of some object.

And the bodies. Nobody in Part IV is acting. Brakhage plays the woodsman, his dog Sirius plays the dog, Jane Brakhage and one of the children appear in the birth and nursing material. What's filmed is labor — climbing, falling, exhaustion, the axe — the body as matter under strain rather than a character with intentions. Deleuze's late category of a cinema of the body, where postures and attitudes carry duration instead of plot, fits, with one twist that's Brakhage's own: the most strenuous body in the film is the one holding the camera, and its effort is right there in the image as blur, jolt, lost focus, breath on the lens.

The credits deserve a pause. Brakhage shot, cut, performed, financed and theorized this alone, which is what made him the model for "personal cinema." Jane Brakhage, later Jane Wodening, was present throughout and by her own subsequent accounts contributed labor, footage and creative input to the domestic work of these years without credit; scholarship has taken that seriously since the 1990s. The film's solitude is partly a story the film tells about itself.

Bazin is worth invoking as the contract this breaks. Bazin's realism asked the shot to preserve the ambiguity of the world — keep the frame open, let the viewer choose inside it — because film's authority came from photographic contact with the real. Brakhage keeps the contact. Everything here is genuinely his mountain, his family, his fire, and the film travels no further than a man without money could walk. What he destroys is the window. Realism of material, not realism of vision.

As narrative it keeps almost nothing: man and dog climb, man falls, man rises, man cuts a tree. Sitney called this kind of work mythopoeic and built the category around Dog Star Man — films that construct a cosmogony instead of telling a story. The armature is thin enough to be a trellis. Everything grows vertically off it. Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon supplied the shape of that trellis: continuity built from matched movement across spatially impossible cuts, and the filmmaker performing her own protagonist with no theatrical apparatus at all.

Forward, the influence splits. One line is affirmative: hand-processed, painted, superimposed filmmaking as a continuing craft, in Phil Solomon, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jennifer Reeves, sustained by Brakhage's decades of teaching. The other is oppositional. The structural filmmakers of the late sixties and seventies — Frampton, Sharits, Snow, the British materialists — defined themselves against his romantic subjectivity, which is influence measured in resistance. Carolee Schneemann's Fuses answered the birth-and-body material from a position deliberately other than the male visionary's. Outside the avant-garde, the cosmic-to-cellular cut has become a recognizable idiom and critics reach for Brakhage's name whenever it turns up, though that's reception history, not a documented debt.

The significance is double. Part IV is the clearest six minutes of the claim the cycle was making: that a film can be looked at the way a painting is looked at, and that the frame rather than the shot can be the unit of composition. And it proved the apparatus. One person, a Bolex, a rewind bench, a co-op founded in 1962 that took no jury and paid the maker — a film could now reach an audience with no studio anywhere in the chain.

Here's what nobody resolves. You cannot see four rolls at twenty-four frames per second. Brakhage knew it; he took the same material apart afterward into The Art of Vision (1965), four and a quarter hours of the strands separated and recombined, which effectively publishes the score. So what is the excess for, if it can't be perceived? Maybe it isn't meant to be perceived, only undergone — the eye trained rather than informed. Watch Part IV twice and find out whether the second pass really does arrive differently. Don't try to resolve the layers. Let your attention rest where it wants and notice what rhymes: sun and nipple, mountain and stump, fire and blood. If it works, you'll step outside afterward and the light will look briefly wrong. That's the film doing its job.