However, very recently - as in the last couple of weeks in fact - I decided, out of curiosity, and the recommendation of a friend, to synchronise some of Brakhage's most acclaimed films with songs or music that I felt appropriate. Although the idea of taking something and, in a sense, changing it against the wishes of the filmmaker is a highly contentious one, the result of this personal experimentation was nonetheless surprisingly significant. Rather than changing the work, or turning it into something new or accidental, the addition of a soundtrack by me seemed to reveal or draw out the hidden layers of emotional explanation that were probably already there to begin with; I just couldn't appreciate them.
All of a sudden these films - which had previously seemed closed-in or beyond personal approach - were swiftly blown wide-open. However, this experiment, no matter how noble or seemingly successful it might have been in making Brakhage more accessible, poses a rather more curious question. If the films didn't appeal to me to begin with, am I really engaging with the film now, as altered by my own idiosyncratic viewing methods, or am I engaging with what I want the film to be; a sort of sound and vision variation of the Kuleshov effect? I'll let you be the judge.
[Start the song, then start the film]
The choice of music doesn't change the images, but it does change the way these images are received. It creates a sort-of context for them. Suddenly, the random montage of shots, splices, dead-frames and scratches becomes not only a sensory experience, but an actual narrative that can be followed and felt. Not a narrative in the conventional sense of a beginning, middle and end, but a narrative that is developed through the emotional associations and connections that we draw from the combination of sound and image. Perhaps this could be seen as a cheat - a way of faking an emotional response to something through an artificial stimulus - but in the end, is it really any different to the idea of commissioning a contemporary live musical accompaniment to a work of early silent cinema?
In watching these pictures with the musical selections of my choice the film became about something. The combination of these images with the actual sound of the music (rather than the more simple expression of the words) suggested to me, in a rather profound and moving manner, what the moment before death might be like. A sudden rush of images, collapsing every experience of a person's life, no matter how long or short it may have been at the point of expiration, and playing them back again as the last gasp of breath is expelled from the body. Conversely, the images from Prelude: Dog Star Man (1962), with their overwhelming presentations of nature, life and sexuality, seemed to suggest some alternative "alien" version of Lars von Trier's film Antichrist (2009), and thus was scored accordingly.
[Start the song, then start the film]
So what do you think; cinematic sacrilege, or a legitimate attempt to make the work "work" for me? Or am I simply talking nonsense, as usual.
