Dog Star Man (rewatch)

Brakhage is not really a filmmaker.  He’s an artist who uses film as his canvas… and usually in the literal sense.  There is no plot and no dialogue.  Dog Star Man happens to have a character (a rarity for Brakhage), but he has no identity and he does nothing except trudge through the snow with a dog.  It would be easy to write off Brakhage’s films as pretentious, meaningless random nonsense.  But like any abstract art, you get out of it what you put into it, and if you fail to be completely receptive to the work, the work will fail to impress you.  Watching Brakhage is somewhat like getting your brain reorganized, like the most intense part of a heavy acid trip.  Confusing images linger onscreen, sometimes coalescing into something recognizable, sometimes not.  At other times, they flicker past in a mad rush, to the point where your eyes no longer try to process them but simply let them invade you.  What the films really mean is ultimately irrelevant.  Brakhage’s own explanations frankly are pretentious.  To me, his movies are (this is going to sound fruity) gateways to rarely visited areas of the mind.  Rating: 9

IMDb