The Riddle of Lumen

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The Riddle of Lumen
The Riddle of Lumen (1972) title.jpg
Directed by Stan Brakhage
CinematographyStan Brakhage
Edited byStan Brakhage
Release date
  • 1972 (1972)
Running time
13 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageSilent

The Riddle of Lumen is a 1972 American experimental short film by Stan Brakhage.

Contents

Production

Brakhage made the film as a response to Hollis Frampton's 1970 film Zorns Lemma . The two filmmakers had been engaged in what P. Adams Sitney described as "a somewhat competitive dialogue about the place of cinema in modernism." [1] He assembled The Riddle of Lumen from footage left over from previous projects. [2]

Analysis

The Riddle of Lumen is an early instance of polyvalent montage. In this style of editing, there are connections between shots that are not immediately obvious to the viewer, but which accumulate over the course of the film. [2] [3] Critic Clinton Delancey notes two recurring images in the film: "that of sunlight flooding through the door or window of a darkened room…and that of light pools bleaching out sections of the floor". [4] Fred Camper identifies it as Brakhage's most abstract film and contrasts it with his other works for its complex patterns of visual substitutions, the monadic context of its imagery, and the way it "works with the light of entire frames [rather than] frames showing light within them". [5]

Release and reception

In his review for The New York Times , A. H. Weiler wrote that "vision and color are artistically heightened as [Brakhage] captures varying light on objects, people, water, streets, skies and forest." [6]

The film was the inspiration for Through the Mysterious Barricade (after F. Couperin) LUMEN 1 (for Stan Brakhage), a 1990 musical improvisation by Fluxus composer Philip Corner. Brakhage used the piece as the soundtrack for his film Passage Through: A Ritual, one of the director's few works to include sound. [7] [8]

The Riddle of Lumen is part of Anthology Film Archives' Essential Cinema Repertory collection. [9] A digital transfer was made for the film's inclusion in the 2008 DVD collection Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986 . [10]

References

  1. ↑ Sitney 2014, pp. 162–163.
  2. 1 2 Sitney 2014, p. 200.
  3. ↑ Suchenski, Richard (2009). "Treasures from American Film Archives IV: Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986". The Moving Image . 9 (2): 190. JSTOR   41164599.
  4. ↑ Delancey, Clinton (June 21, 1973). "A varied burst of Brakhage". The Village Voice . p. 88.
  5. ↑ Camper, Fred (January 1973). "'Western History' and 'The Riddle of Lumen'". Artforum . Vol. 11, no. 5. Retrieved April 19, 2025.
  6. ↑ Weiler, A. H. (November 11, 1972). "Abstraction Prevails in Film Forum Shorts". The New York Times . p. 23. Retrieved April 19, 2025.
  7. ↑ Smigel 2017, p. 122.
  8. ↑ Powers, John (2019). "Moving through stasis in Stan Brakhage's Passage Through: A Ritual". Screen . 60 (3): 410–411. doi:10.1093/screen/hjz028.
  9. ↑ "Essential Cinema". Anthology Film Archives . Retrieved April 20, 2025.
  10. ↑ Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2009). "Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986. National Film Preservation Foundation/Image Entertainment, 2009". Quarterly Review of Film and Video . 26 (3): 263. doi:10.1080/10509200902820142.

Bibliography

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