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Anticipation of the Night
Anticipation of the Night marks a turning point for both film history and the oeuvre of Stan Brakhage. The psychological dramas of his earlier work give way to a more formal vocabulary. It is a compelling idyll, a lament, an exorcism, and a death wish. Brakhage shows how mortal our visual experience is. He depicts the descent from paradisiacal, optical ecstasy into the nocturnal darkness that overwhelms our gaze when viewing is crucified in the socialization process.
Everything in Anticipation of the Night is shown in a multitude of aspects, at varying speeds, with crucial changes in lighting and graininess. This film bids farewell to the protagonist’s last dying thought and to all the primitive “point of view” tricks of narrative cinema. Brakhage presents the filmmaker as the all-determining authority for viewing. His subjectivity is paramount, but the viewer participates and becomes strongly involved. In his films, cinematography has become a signature. An autobiography in the present tense, life as it unfolds. The camera dances, whipped up by what it sees, like an extension of the limbs and the nervous system’s electrical charge.
Bio Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) is one of the most influential filmmakers in American avant-garde cinema, noted for his unflinching social commentaries and technical innovations. The wildly prolific, visionary Brakhage made more than 200 films over a half-century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, and even autopsy. Many of his most famous works, including Dog Star Man (1961) and The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight (1963) …
The daylight shadow of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose held in hand reflects both sun and moon-like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promissory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams, becoming the amusement, their circular games, becoming the morning. The trees change color and lose their leaves for the morn, they become the complexity of branches in which the shadow man hangs himself.
With Anticipation of the Night, Stan Brakhage introduced what P. Adams Sitney would term the ‘lyrical’ mode to experimental film. Camera angles and movement, colour, focus, and contrast between light and darkness all contribute to creating the impression of emotions expressed directly through the camera. Rapid, circular movements across a green lawn reveal a baby crawling in the foliage, and the film seems to illustrate Brakhage’s notion of the ‘un-tutored eye’ trying to make sense of the world through intuition and immediate visual experience rather than logic.
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- This film was #62 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025