Commingled Containers could have been the legendary director’s final film. Shot and edited in anticipation of cancer surgeries, the short finds Brakhage pondering eternity as he plumbs Boulder Creek.
“And when the roll came back from the lab, between the exploratory surgery and the removal of the bladder, I was so moved by it, and said, ‘OK, this is my last film,’ and sat and edited it.” — Stan Brakhage
On their surface, Stan Brakhage’s early black-and-white films don’t look much like the works that’d help make his name. They’ve got clear narratives and easily identifiable characters – some even have sound. In a 1996 conversation with scholar Scott MacDonald, however, Brakhage suggests several key similarities between his first film, Interim (1952), and Commingled Containers, a then-new return to photography after years spent painting on celluloid. Though Interim looks as different from Brakhage’s colorful, silent abstractions or his impressionistic diaries as possible, its protagonist predicts the primary thematic concerns of Brakhage’s best films and perhaps his entire artistic practice. He agrees with MacDonald that Interim’s lead experiences a kind of spiritual visitation by exploring his city’s viaducts. Desperation, Brakhage says, encourages the unnamed character to explore this mysterious realm. He finds an “undersurface” there, a place “where things really happen.”
A similar feeling of desperation and spiritual searching inspired Brakhage to dip his camera beneath the water of Boulder Creek while awaiting diagnostic cancer surgery and create Commingled Containers. “I believe that in both cases,” Brakhage tells MacDonald, “I was doing basically the same thing.” Commingled Containers explores a literal undersurface, a submerged landscape of heavenly, ever-evolving shapes, but other Brakhage films take this plunge too. Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1972) depict an undersurface by fixing an unwavering gaze on taboo subjects, childbirth and death; the likes of Anticipation of the Night (1958) and Scenes from Under Childhood (1970) bring almost-faded snatches of memory and sensation to the surface; Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991) suggests the inner workings of the eyeball and countless others call to mind closed-eye vision. Laying eyes on the undersurface requires, as Brakhage famously wrote, abandoning factors like “compositional logic”1 and instead embarking on an “adventure of perception.” Adopting an untrained perspective enables the observer to pass below the surface of everyday experience and observe an undersurface “shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color.” Brakhage wrote those words in 1963, but that last bit describes the experience of watching Commingled Containers more than maybe any other of his hundreds of films.
For Brakhage, accessing the undersurface with a camera or brushes and paint typically involved slipping into what he called a trance state, a concentration so deep he couldn’t call it anything else. He went so far as to acknowledge the influence of a higher power and say that he believed his films were given to him to make during these trances. The trance that resulted in Commingled Containers entailed finally using a number of extension tubes that Brakhage’s father had gifted the filmmaker along with his first camera. Immersed in Boulder Creek and facing down oblivion, Brakhage was perhaps acting out of desperation when he fixed the tubes to his lens. Whatever his inspiration, Brakhage discovered imagery he seems fated to have found. Commingled Containers represents the culmination of his spiritual and sense-redefining missions.
A trio of establishing shots offers three very different looks at Commingled Containers’ undersurface and familiarizes us with the variety of shapes Brakhage will capture. The second and third in particular establish a visual template for shots we’ll see later in the film. We open on shafts of light like pinpricks in the filmstrip that create waving sheets. They resemble approaching rain clouds or the aurora borealis until they suddenly change direction to streak across the screen horizontally. It’s perhaps the film’s longest shot and is followed by one of about equal length. Formations like puffs of smoke or anemones slowly sprout in the background until the frame is overwhelmed by bubbles breaking closer to the screen. Brakhage brings us near the source of some percolating essence, a spirit we’ll come to know intimately through shots of both peaceful and intense bubbling, one that will soon allow us to float between the overwhelming surface world and this quiet undersurface full of pleasant, near-organic shapes. The palette changes dramatically for the final shot of the trio, from blue to a muddy slate green. Luminous bubbles lazily pop near the top of the frame while others, out of focus, do the same deeper in the center of the image. Light has taken its third different form. We’re now seeing thanks to a dull orange orb at the top-left of the frame.
As the editing speed picks up, Brakhage mixes in hand-painted imagery. The splotches of electric blue “water” suggest the results of a chemical reaction, while darker and lighter shapes scattered in multiple layers recall cross-sections of plant cells isolated for inspection. Shots of the churning surface bookend the hand-painted imagery and give the whole sequence a sense of unease. Later shots of the surface could pass for coverage in some river-set action movie, but these bear a more ineffable menace, suggesting a volcanic pit or the roiling in an anxious gut. It is as if the filmmaker has retreated to this fantastical world of his own creation to escape those surface tensions. Commingled Containers’ natural undersurface proves more visually dazzling and offers longer, more restful respites from surface woes. Somehow these moments below the water allow us to catch our breath. Crucially, Brakhage never aims his camera at a rock. We’re either too caught up in the stream or too dazzled by the underwater displays to notice them.
At about the 45-second mark, we land on Commingled Containers’ most arresting image, one we’ll see repeated several times. Bubbles cluster together, bending and folding rather than popping. They capture the light and create shapes like contact lenses or translucent petals. These orbs, suspended in silence, present the starkest contrast to Brakhage’s occasional looks at the surface, shots we can practically hear and could easily soundtrack ourselves. One late shot of the creek’s obsidian-black waves looks especially forbidding. Each new trip below the water proves more restorative than the previous one, though we know the relief won’t last. Several shots resemble rainwater on a window or as seen through tearful eyes. There’s something almost nostalgic in Brakhage’s evocation of rainy days. Our own memories and wandering thoughts commingle with the director’s trance-borne discoveries.
During the film’s final shots, the world above the surface looks inviting for the first time. Sunlight at the top of the frame begins to spread around its edges. The sun illuminates the creek’s waves and envelops us in its warmth. Light ultimately overwhelms our senses, closing in from all sides. Viewers are reminded of the last sequence in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and its damaged frames, a happy accident that suggests (both on and under the surface) the potential presence of the divine. Peeking out of the waves and into the heavens, Brakhage reaches what would have been a fitting culmination in his career-long spiritual journey.
Commingled Containers was not, as Brakhage initially predicted, his final film. The director’s output remained prolific, though he would almost exclusively paint on celluloid rather than produce films photographically. Brakhage’s last statement came when sickness forced him to rely on the humblest means possible to break through to the undersurface. From his hospital bed, he wet 35mm filmstrips with saliva and scratched into their emulsion with his fingernails. While beautiful and recognizably Brakhagian, Chinese Series’ (2003) tangles of white, yellow, and faint blue look like what they are, the work of someone clinging to life by the tips of their fingers and struggling through their final words. Shots of the surface world amount to simple stretches of unscratched emulsion. They’re far more harrowing than Commingled Containers’ churning stream. Here, the only alternative to exploring the undersurface through desperate searching is the nothingness of dreamless sleep and death. Each time blackness overwhelms the frame, we wonder if we’ve finally said goodbye to one of the great filmmakers for the last time. It’s as tear-jerking as experimental film gets.
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- The famous opening to Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision reads:
“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.”
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