BRAKHAGE SUNDAY SALON EXCERPT #1 (7/5/1998)

on MURDER PSALM (1980)

The first in a series of clips culled from Stan Brakhage’s Sunday salons, recorded over many years (I have about 120 hours of tape). Stan would screen some 5-7 films from his personal collection, and then a small  group of us (open to the public, with some core participants on a regular basis) would gather in a conference room next door (in the old Fine Arts building at CU) for in-depth conversation. I never meant to make anything visual from this material - I was essentially using the video camera to record audio for a (forthcoming) book (A Snail’s Trail in the Moonlight: Conversations with Brakhage) and I didn’t want have the camera make the folks in the room self-conscious, so I only focused the camera on Stan (who knew - and I think was gratified - that I was recording these for “posterity”). As anyone who attended these ’salons’ could tell you, it was the most relaxed and thoughtful I’d ever seen him in a public setting (and non-defensive and least performative - more our Boulder Stan than the public “Brakhage”) - very different from his on-the-road demeanor. He really needed to converse and think about aesthetics, and it often played into his work process in interesting ways (on a rare occasion, a work would change radically after he previewed his first cut and received feedback). As you can hear from my voice, it was terribly exciting for me to be able to go over his work film by film, respond to the work right after viewing it with him, and ask him all of the things I never really had the opportunity to do in public (more on that another time…). I’ll go into a brief history of the salons in the book, and will pepper these talks with some choice phone messages and my own comments on the films from each session.

As I continue to transcribe and edit these tapes, I will continue to drop some into the site from time to time. I am currently in conversation with a producer at Criterion who expressed serious interest in including some of these clips as bonus “special features” material on the forthcoming 3 disc By Brakhage II collection.

One of the most precious gifts of the many that he gave to me was a print of MURDER PSALM housed in the original film can (which has masking tape on the front with the handwritten title) that held the particular materials he had kept in the can for years (dating from “before ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT“) before he finally came to resurrect it in an editing ‘trance’ of 3 sleepless nights in 1980 (responding to his horror of a visceral dream of matricide of his adopted mother).

He tells this the origins tale in this clip.