Stan Brakhage described his film as "a hand-painted visualization of sex in the mind's eye". My mind finds little that could be called erotic, but much that is visually sensuous. In part, that is due to his painting techniques here, as many of the individual images are strongly crackled or impastoed and apparently photographed still wet, so that the paint glistens in the changing light. Additionally, the rate of image change is much slower than usual with him. Rather than the expected 12-24 images per second, here we see 2 or 3 per second and have more time to enjoy the abstract shapes and the rotation of rich colors through the palette. Should some numerically-oriented person ever decide to count the total of individual paintings done by Brakhage in his hundreds of short films, I think we'll find that Picasso was not the most prolific painter of the 20th century after all. "Lovesong" forms a striking and satisfying conclusion to the "By Brakhage" collection.
2 Reviews
The usual forgettable Brakhage
Horst_In_Translation11 August 2015
Warning: Spoilers
"Lovesong" is a 11-minute movie that prolific filmmaker Stan Brakhage aka Robert Sanders made not even 15 years ago, 2 years before his death. It's a bit of back to the roots for him. The style is his usual, it's a silent movie and as most of his works has no people while looking like recorded through a kaleidoscope. Brakhage made several sequels to this one in the time he had left, possibly dedicated to his second wife Marylin. Sadly, even if it may work as a sweet gesture, I cannot say it works from an audience perspective. The shots change so quickly that really all I somehow took from these 10 minutes were the colors. It's almost painful on the eyes to watch this one. I am generally not a fan of Brakhage and only enjoy very few of his works. This one is certainly not among them. Thumbs down.
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