Dog Star Man
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Dog Star Man
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1992.
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Dog Star Man is a series of short experimental films, all directed by Stan Brakhage, featuring Jane Wodening. It was released in installments between 1961 and 1964 and comprises a prelude and four parts. In 1992, Dog Star Man was included in its entirety in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation.
Described as a "cosmological epic" and "creation myth" (particularly the Prelude), Dog Star Man illustrates the odyssey of a bearded woodsman (Brakhage) climbing through a snow-covered mountain with his dog to chop down a tree. While doing so, he witnesses various mystical visions with various recurring imagery such as a woman, child, nature, and the cosmos while making his ascent.
The five short films all form one larger film, and they are almost always shown together as one film. In 1965, Brakhage used the same footage from Dog Star Man and re-edited it into a much longer film, The Art of Vision. Both are generally considered the greatest works of his first mature period.
Why It's A Star Man
- The film's considered a masterpiece of experimental filmmaking. Shot in 16mm, the film utilized variable exposure times and the physical manipulation of the film stock, including painting directly on the film and scratching its surface, to produce specific visual effects.
- Artistically creative structure for all four of the parts.
- Prelude (25 mins) moves from complete darkness, to intermittent flares and flickers of light, and then to quick glimpses of seemingly unrelated images. The prelude introduces the principal images (the axe-bearing woodsman, a full moon, a birth, a lactating breast, a naked woman, mountains and trees that appear to stretch and writhe, a weathered, grey, dead tree, etc) and formal techniques that will recur as the film progresses (most shots being brief and combined with other shots through superimposition and quick montage; dynamic camera movement—usually hand-held; the surge and flow of light, color, texture, and rapidly changing images)
- Part 1 (30 mins and the longest segment) offers a change of pace from Prelude's split-second montage with an overload of materials and content. Many of its shots are longer and there is only one layer of images. Its principal subject is the woodsman, with his axe and dog, working his way up a snowy mountainside, slipping and stumbling in a kind of two-steps-forward-one-step-back progression.
- Part 2 (7 mins) in which two layers of images are superimposed, features extreme close-ups of a new-born child and a technique that is new to the film: bits of images inserted into holes punched in successive frames of the film to produce a kind of animated mosaic or collage-like effect suggesting the infant's initial, disjointed engagement with the world outside the womb. Among the superimposed images are more shots of the woodsman working his way upwards as Part 2 begins, and falling backwards as it ends.
- Adding a third layer of superimposition, Part 3 (11mins) is mainly about the erotic body. Bare flesh, breasts and buttocks, vagina and penis, caressing hands and undulating bodies meet, overlap, merge, dissolve, and metamorphose. Distinctions between male and female and markers of separate individualities become increasingly blurred, and near the end the camera "penetrates" the fleshy, erotic surface of the body to display a beating heart and other more ambiguous images connoting the body's interior fluids, tissues, cavities, and organs.
- Part 4 (6 mins) contains four layers of superimposition, and images of the woodsman chopping the dead tree take center stage, until the final moments which bookends Prelude the screen returns, by way of abstract flashes of light, to total darkness.
- With its innovative new techniques, it is considered to have ushered in a new age of experimental film. Brakhage later incorporated it into a longer film titled "The Art of Vision" (1965).
- There are various different ways to interpret just what the cycle "means", although some clues are available. The "plot" (or rather, the closest there is to one) has a woodsman attempt to chop down a tree on top of a mountain during a blizzard.
- Sirius, the Dog Star, is the brightest star in the sky apart from the sun; it was also the name of Brakhage's pet dog.
- One critic interpreted that the four parts occur during a single day, with the Prelude depicting "dreams of the preceding night". The four parts can be broken down roughly into seasons.
- It's possible the film's a metaphor for the struggles and journey of life and an exploration on the history of man with the various images serving as ways to back the claim up.
- Brakhage's artistic work has commonly been used for inspiration in mainstream culture, from music videos to feature films. Though few have managed to match his conceptual rigor, the work still left an enormous impact on our media
Trivia
- Dog Star Man is the first experimental feature film to be inducted into the National Film Registry.