Cinema
Dog Star Man
Stan Brakhage · 1964
Synopsis
A bearded woodcutter, played by Brakhage himself, climbs a snow-covered mountain with his dog, an axe in his hand, towards a dead tree. The film has neither speech nor sound and consists of five parts, a prelude and four numbered parts. Around this ascent pass the sun and the moon seen through a telescope, vessels and blood cells under a microscope, a beating heart, the filmmaker's wife nude, their infant in extreme close-up, painted and scratched film. The images are superimposed: two layers in the prelude, one in the first part, then two, three and four.
Context
The five parts were released separately, from the prelude of 1961 to the last two parts of 1964, before being brought together. Brakhage himself plays the woodcutter, and his wife, Jane, the naked woman. From the first part onwards, each section adds a layer of images to the previous one. The following year, he took up all the reels shot for this film and combined them in every possible way, which produced another film of more than four hours.
Who it is for
A silent film of about seventy-five minutes, with no continuous narrative, made of superimposed images that are sometimes hard to decipher.
Prizes and reception
Shown in New York in February 1965, distributed by the filmmakers' cooperative, it was added to the National Film Registry in 1992.
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