Contesting the Sublime

Confronted with the overwhelming enormity of Stan Brakhage’s work, one is tempted to seek a certain metaphysical and romanticist gaze persisting in his lyrical
cinematic visions, despite Brakhage’s own refutations of romantic traditions and its representations of the sublime. A refutation which extends deep into many of his
films, where the spectacle of nature is often profoundly questioned and contested with both symbolic and physical means, bearing on cinema’s materiality itself. In result, the romanticist separation between its subject and the sublime, between body and nature is erased to allow an affective cinematic coupling of both, but also preserved in vision to produce their dialectical superposition. With Brakhage, the cinematic dispositif itself thus rises as inherently critical of the sublime and the atemporal which readily translate into societal oppression.

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