Brakhage virtually invented and singularly dominated the characteristic genre of American avant-garde cinema: the crisis film, that lyric articulation of the moods and observations of the filmmaker, following a rhythmical association of images without a predetermined scenario or enacted drama. Since the early ’60s he handpainted on film so elaborately that he brought that way of filmmaking, at least as old as Len Lye’s work in the mid-’30s, to new profundities. It became the predominant process of his filmmaking in the ’90s. Perhaps a quarter of his oeuvre was made without using a camera.
Brakhage could never stop making films. At his poorest, when he couldn’t afford a roll of film, he collected leaves and the wings of dead moths in his in-laws’ house and in a Denver theater where he, his wife Jane, and their three children were living rent free. He sandwiched this organic matter in rhythmic patterns between layers of transparent, sprocketed editing tape to make his gorgeous Mothlight (1963).
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