The Text of Light | |
---|---|
Directed by | Stan Brakhage |
Cinematography | Stan Brakhage |
Distributed by | New York Filmmakers Cooperative Canyon Cinema |
Release date | October 26, 1974 |
Running time | 67 minutes |
Country | United States |
The Text of Light is a 1974 American experimental film directed by Stan Brakhage.
Time-lapse photography of books, paintings, reflections, and light falling on textures, [1] shot entirely through a glass ashtray. [2]
The film is considered an "epistemological meditation": "This uncommon lens [that is the glass ashtray] generates an equally uncommon image of the world. The density and shape of the glass subtracts linear perspective from the visual field. In this respect, the ash-tray takes up part of the function of rapid camera movements and zooms in other Brakhage films insofar as the ash-tray demolishes perspective. As well, in Text of Light objects lose their individuation, their outlines blurred in masses of light and color." [3] A presentation by Jonathan P. Watts for the Tate underlines the influence of Turner on this film: "In The Text of Light Turner’s influence is felt in the experimental use of colour, and is similarly visionary in the way it collapses naturalistic pictorial space." [4]
Joseph Mallord William Turner, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. He left behind more than 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, and 30,000 works on paper. He was championed by the leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.
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Car headlights and taillights become abstract orbs, similar to Stan Brakhage's experimental film "The Text of Light" (1974)