Moth Light

Stan Brakhage with music by Simon P Barber. Daniel Kane showed this at SWP this summer along with his lecture about poetry, film and the avant-garde, his upcoming book's subject. His class watched these great movies all week; I tried to sit in for some one morning and the computer wouldn't load. The film reel was created by Brakhage actually taping moth wings, leaves and debris to a long strip of tape and then taking that to be transfered into a film reel. I'm not too film savvy so when he first explained this I thought he literally ran a long thread of tape with moth wings taped inside through a projector, which sounded really cool. But he clarified this, and my way would not be a good idea since it would probably break the projector. I didn't think of this question till later but I'm wondering now what he was doing with all those moth wings. I mean, I hope no moths were injured in the making of this film. Daniel Kane said later to me at a party that Alice Notley came up to him after the lecture and said, "They weren't poets." In reference to the film makers, some of whom worked closely with poets; Brakhage filmed Creeley and McClure. It's interesting to me that she felt the need to establish that, and I can see how in his lecture it appeared he was conflating the two. I have to agree with Notley, the film isn't a poem. But I've always been fascinated how the visual and the word artists seem to feed off of one another, so there is a difference albeit a malleable one. This video really needs to be seen on a giant wall so that one can just fall into it and get lost.