Working completely outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he has turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight, were made without using a camera at all, as he pioneered the art of making images directly on film, by drawing, painting, and scratching.
Mothlight was released in 1963. The film was created without the use of a camera, by pressing objects between two strips of clear mylar film, and passing them through an optical printer.
Brakhage used what he then described as "a whole new film technique." He collected moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass, and pressed them between two clear strips of 35mm mylar film. The resulting assemblage was then passed through an optical printer to allow projection in a cinema. The objects chosen were required to be thin and translucent, to permit the passage of light. Mothlight has been described as boasting a "three-part musical structure."
"Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception."
- Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision”, in Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking (New York: McPherson and Company, 2001), p. 12.
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