Mothlight

Something like the Stone Age epitome of machine art, Mothlight proposes an alternative form of cinematic production. A projection piece predicated on the fixed rhythm developed from the Lumières’ cinématographe, Brakhage’s film is almost ridiculously primitive, not to mention crazily labor-intensive in its artisanal means. Produced during the summer of 1963, while the artist was in the process of shooting and editing his cosmic psychodrama Dog Star Man, Mothlight was created by painstakingly collaging bits and pieces of organic matter—moth wings, most notably, as well as flowers, seeds, leaves, and blades of grass—and sandwiching them between two layers of clear 16-mm Mylar editing tape.

Film historian P. Adams Sitney has characterised Mothlight as Brakhage’s radical response to an “oppressive economic situation.” Without money to buy film stock, the artist conceived the idea of working directly with reality. But, regardless of what motivated him, Brakhage—would-be poet, shameless visionary, self-dramatizing expressionist that he was—also created something as materialist as any Stella canvas or Judd construction. Mothlight abolishes photography altogether, and yet—more than any movie ever made—it is profoundly indexical. At the same time, the artist was practicing a particular sort of magic.