“The eyes are flaring with little stories…”

We tend to associate myths with words, with repeatable narratives that can be written or spoken. In Eye Myth, Stan Brakhage was intent on producing a myth that could be purely mediated by the eye. In commentary on the film he says that “the eyes are flaring with little stories,” and this short seems to catch the eye in action. The eye here is constructive, aware, perceptive enough that it almost begins to re-educate itself. Eye Myth is about a sense of myth-making that side steps the literary processes we usually associate it with.


His shortest piece, at nine seconds, Eye Myth took Brakhage a year to make. It is also one of his most gratifying hand-painted films, in which he would actually paint every frame (that’s 24 per second) and then roll that strip of film through a projector. Part of what makes it so satisfying is that as it plays so quickly, it can be immediately digested. Many of his longer hand-painted works have languorous gestation periods. But its potency also derives from the haunting composition Brakhage stumbles upon towards the end of the piece. A confluence of paint flickers by until the image of a seated man facing right emerges. He flashes through a number of abstract permutations until the frame unexpectedly flips to the left, and for a brief moment becomes relatively defined amidst the clouds of color. He could be thought of as trapped in the paint, perhaps momentarily freed. But that may oversimplify Brakhage’s intention. It would be better to think of the man in those final frames as the final flourish of an Eye Myth, the grounding thought or image that relates the myth to the this-world state of affairs it is attempting to make sense of. (Because this is what myths do.)


In the same commentary though, Brakhage makes a very subtle mistake. He points out that part of the “oxymoron” implicit to the short is that the word “myth” actually comes from a word meaning “mouth.” Technically, this isn’t true. The Greek word mythos from which we have the literary term “myth” corresponds more to the act of speaking than the means by which one speaks. And even more than that, in Homer it typically refers to lengthy speeches or explanations of events that eventually became a genre in themselves. While this lexical correction undercuts the sense of the film as a physical oxymoron between the things eyes are supposed to do and the things mouths are supposed to do, it ends up highlighting what Brakhage is getting at anyway. Eye Myth really is about discourse, but it is more specifically about ways in which the eye constructs stories in ways that are typically associated with the mouth. For Brakhage, discourse can’t just be limited to speech activities and this is at base is the ontology of film.


And I have actually been to a little town called Eyemouth, so I know what I am talking about.