Marital Mythmaking: Brakhage's Seaside Poems to His Wife

Mammals imagines Marilyn's teenage years, and is appropriately dominated by energetic flux and flow: rippling waters, wispy TV-monitor ghost distortions, jewel-like lens refractions, and sparse bursts of periwinkle-painted footage. Sometimes hazy-focused, at other times subtly emerging from near-total darkness, the ocean shore is transformed into an undulating abstract composition, an icy Rothko painted with camera and light. The God of Day envisions, in Brakhage's words, "mid-age crisis." Whereas the waters run clear in Mammals, here they are cluttered with organic flotsam, or churn violently in storms. Iconic figures—a black dog splashing, a pair of kayakers, a rainbow-colored kite—tease with opportunities for symbolism or narrative, which then disappear in the shifting cinematographic currents. These two seashore films work as self-reflective songs of experience—somber updates of Brakhage's earlier, mystic songs of shaggy innocence. The topic may be Marilyn, but the subject remains Stan: a solitary man, contemplating life's finitude against the vastness of the creation.