It’s Not Brakhage
202400:54:39
It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film following an artist-researcher’s investigation into a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, produced during a ruinous 1959 collaboration with military-industrial giant DuPont. Structured as a detective story, the film follows the narrator’s feverish attempt to disprove Brakhage’s authorship of the reel, and instead posit the “lost work” as a forensic clue connecting DuPont with Brakhage’s death in 2003 from a rare form of bladder cancer.
As the narrator searches for the “Lost Brakhage” film’s actual author through an archival labyrinth of shadowy associations connecting the DuPont company with numerous prominent 20th-century artistic legacies, the investigation slowly dissolves into an anxious mise-en-abyme where identity, authorship, and intention disappear behind refractions of power and influence.
