Stan Brakhage's ARABICS
Presented by Hisham Bizri

Thursday, February 8, 2007
7pm in Nicholson Hall 155, University of Minnesota

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. But the darkness is not "night," or even simply some more abstract absence of light, but a more profound vacuum: it represents a world stripped of all the coordinates of the known, an unmeasurable absence. When fragments of light appear at the edges of an image mostly dark in its center, they can seem like pieces of objects that are mostly offscreen, or like points on some larger visual continuum which includes darkness as a part of it, or both at once — and then all such theories get wiped out when the lights suddenly expand to fill the frame.” Fred Camper

Fred Camper's extensive page on Brakhage:
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageL.html