It’s Not Brakhage
2024It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction essay film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a ruinous 1959 film festival, which Brakhage was hired to help organize with the DuPont chemical company.
Throughout the film, the narrator expounds on this mysterious film’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the film reel to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic patronage. Gradually, a sinister edge emerges, suggesting that the film might not just represent an uncanny crossover between mid-century networks of experimental film and military-industrial power, but might represent a forensic key connecting this 1959 collaboration with DuPont to Brakhage’s 2003 death from bladder cancer.
Weaving threads of speculative fiction within a wide corpus of extensive historical research, It’s Not Brakhage mixes detailed exposition, political invective, and conspiratorial intrigue to think through the uncomfortable proxies connecting histories of experimental film with military-industrial research and capitalist dominion. While the film’s narrator, the “lost Brakage” film reel, the 1959 festival, and Brakhage’s entire involvement with DuPont are ultimately fictional interventions, these fabrications serve to give structure to a pointed exploration of DuPont’s very real implication, throughout much of the 20th century, in a vast network of scientists, engineers, militarists, filmmakers, painters, and musicians, many of which hailed from the same families or drew from the same technologies.
With a blur of tropes from essayistic documentary, genre fiction, and experimental film, this work dramatizes a desire to uncover the sordid material powers hiding in histories of art and film, while anxiously questioning the possibility of confronting these networks from within.
