Book
Metaphors on Vision by Brakhage
Price: EUR 39,25
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "Green"? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the "beginning was the word."
So begins Stan Brakhage's classic Metaphors on Vision. First published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas as a special issue of Film Culture, it stands as the major theoretical statement by one of avant-garde cinema's most influential figures, a treatise on mythopoeia and the nature of visual experience written in a style as idiosyncratic as his art. By turns lyrical, technical, and philosophical, this is a collection to be shelved alongside the commentaries of Robert Bresson and Maya Deren, Sergei Eisenstein and Nagisa Oshima.
Yet despite its historical importance and undeniable influence, the complete Metaphors has remained out of print in the US for over forty years. In 2017, Brakhage's composition has been reviewed by film theorist and historian P. Adams Sitney and is available in a new edition complete with annotations published by Light Industry and Anthology Film Archives.
So begins Stan Brakhage's classic Metaphors on Vision. First published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas as a special issue of Film Culture, it stands as the major theoretical statement by one of avant-garde cinema's most influential figures, a treatise on mythopoeia and the nature of visual experience written in a style as idiosyncratic as his art. By turns lyrical, technical, and philosophical, this is a collection to be shelved alongside the commentaries of Robert Bresson and Maya Deren, Sergei Eisenstein and Nagisa Oshima.
Yet despite its historical importance and undeniable influence, the complete Metaphors has remained out of print in the US for over forty years. In 2017, Brakhage's composition has been reviewed by film theorist and historian P. Adams Sitney and is available in a new edition complete with annotations published by Light Industry and Anthology Film Archives.
Stan Brakhage
Metaphors on Vision
Edited by Adams Sitney
Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry, 2017, 212 pages, in English
ISBN 978-0-9979102-0-9
Add to cart
* Our supporting members receive a 20% discount on in-house publications and articles (T-shirts, bags, and posters of the Film Museum) at the box office. These are marked online. In our webshop: When placing your order, please enter your membership number in the comments field and select the payment method "Prepayment." You will then receive a reduced invoice.