The Garden of Earthly Delights

With a spade in one had, a camera in the other Stan Brakhage digs about a garden and comes up with a rare work that has a beginning, middle and end. Gathering lawn and garden scraps he opens in dark background moves into light before closing in black. Some of the images are sharp and clear and offer momentary hope of grasping onto a pattern but Stan seems to be in a hurry and the last quarter dashes any hope as it buries itself in darkness and duller imagery, the early freshness and vitality of the opening, day old stale at the end.

Two minutes of very fast still images of plants pressed between two plates and photographed. There is no sound and it all moves too fast to see anything. I then slowed it down to 1/16th speed, so each frame takes a bit less than a second, and discovered many beautiful images. It's much better much slower.

Stan Brakhage described 'The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981)' as "a homage to (but also an argument against) Heironymous Bosch." He obviously wasn't referring to the detective character by Michael Connolly, so I dug a little deeper, and learnt about the Early Netherlandish painter of the same name (c. 1450 – 1516), whose triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is an awesomely rich and complex work of art. I spent a few minutes studying the painting at high resolution, but didn't really reach any conclusions regarding its meaning. The general consensus seems to be that Bosch is warning against the perils of lust and other worldly temptations.

But back to Brakhage's film. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of temptation; the collage of plant matter (probably squashed between two strips of mylar film, as with 'Mothlight (1963)') appears organic, but hardly erotic. Brakhage also cited as inspiration ""The Tangled Garden" by J.E.H. MacDonald, and the flower paintings of Emil Nolde. The connection here is more apparent: these works show nature in disorder, branches of vegetation twisting and scrambling across each other in a messy but natural manner (in Bosch's painting, the opposite is true). Personally, I was reminded of the tessellations of M.C. Escher, with shapes seeming to blend into each other, forming recognisable flocks of birds and fish.