The Text of Light is one of Stan Brakhage’s most celebrated forays into the primal elements of cinema. Filming for days entirely into a glass ashtray, he caught rays of refracted sunlight and made a film which exists solely to examine light itself. Out of a tiny area of glass come amazingly complex and beautiful patterns of light and color. The Text of Light is accompanied by the rarely screened film Sea Rhythms by Jim Davis, a painter, sculptor and filmmaker to whom Brakhage dedicated The Text of Light. Finally, Brakhage’s late masterwork Commingled Containers, shot just above and just under the surface of water, creates a vision of bent light rays as microscopic beings.

Sea Rhythms (Jim Davis, 1971), 16mm, color, silent, 10 minutes (screened by special arrangement with Anthology Film Archives)
Pasht (Stan Brakhage, 1965), 16mm, color, silent, 5 minutes
Commingled Containers (Stan Brakhage, 1996), 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes
The Text of Light (Stan Brakhage, 1974), 16mm, color, silent, 71 minutes

strip from "The Text of Light" by Stan Brakhage, courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper

Eyedrum
290 Martin Luther King Jr Dr, Suite 8
Atlanta, GA
404.522.0655
www.eyedrum.org

Available Light main page

Film Love home page

Frequent Small Meals home page