A Brief Reflection on Stan Brakhage's 'Metaphors on Vision' and Dziga Vertov's KINO-EYE

Stan Brakhage tackles semiotics and semantics a couple of years prior to Joseph Kosuth (but only in works like Mothlight [1963], not in writing), spinning a yarn in Metaphors on Vision where he at once memorializes of the art of seeing without classifying and melodramatically laments a world that has forsaken vision. He supplies that visual information in its purest form can be seen again by men as adults after they have lost the innocence of their youth and given in to classification and calcification of visual information as ideas and not as stimuli. This sort of thing comes on the heels of the death of the modernist art movement, describing his personal vision of the imperative of artists and art to educate the masses on the intricate and tricky nature of visual information. It’s still clutching at modernist pearls of a universality of pure visual stimuli in 1978, but I think Brakhage is being pretty mature about moving ahead into postmodern territory. Mostly, I appreciate his descriptions of burning and crackling film negatives – we’ve been talking a lot about the concept of death and how that relates to being filmed and photographed in class, and I think that metaphor speaks to me the most.

We also read KINO-EYE, The Writings of Dziga Vertov, which was edited by Annette Michelson and translated by Kevin O’Brien for the University of California Press in 1984. The excerpt starts with ‘The Council of Three’. Pardon me if I can’t help but roll my eyes sometimes at how young artists wanting to make a splash say that everyone is doing art wrong (in this case film). However, immediately thereafter, I sincerely and without batting an eye say that he is 100% correct that employing institutionalized art conventions on the camera (square frame, classic composition, etc.) is a critical limitation that art can subvert. It’s worth consideration when it comes to any new media that it doesn’t have to be as conventions dictate. In that sense, I have to share in Vertov’s glee in feeling free, because it really is exciting.