# Metaphors on Vision [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/metaphorsonvisio00brak) *Brakhage, Stan. Metaphors on Vision. Film Culture No. 30. New York: Film Culture, Spring 1963.* ## Description Brakhage's foundational theoretical statement, published by Jonas Mekas as a special issue of *Film Culture* and designed by George Maciunas; a loose, prose-poetic collection of manifesto and working notes arguing for a cinema that recovers an "untutored eye" — vision prior to the naming and perspectival conventions imposed by language and Renaissance optics — and that treats closed-eye, hypnagogic, and entoptic seeing as legitimate cinematic subject matter. Long out of print in full, it was reissued in 2017 by Anthology Film Archives / Anthology Editions. ## Key Tags #vision #film-theory #avant-garde-film #entoptic #lyrical ## Key Passages - "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?" (opening lines) - "The artist has carried the tradition of vision and visualization down through the ages. In the present time a very few have continued the process of visual perception in its deepest sense and transformed their inspiration into cinematic expression." (qtd. in [[Light Moving in Time]]) ## Notes by Chapter %% The book has no formal chapter numbering; it is a serial collection of a central manifesto essay followed by shorter prose notes, mostly written to or about specific films. %% ### "Metaphors on Vision" (title essay) The core manifesto: rejects inherited, language-bound and Renaissance-perspectival ways of seeing in favor of an "adventure of perception" — an eye that meets the world before it is named. Frames the filmmaker's task as recovering this pre-linguistic, "untutored" vision and inventing a cinematic grammar equal to it, including "closed-eye vision" (hypnagogic and hypnopompic imagery) as material on par with open-eye sight. ### Notes on individual films Shorter prose entries, closer to working notes or letters than criticism, addressed to specific films of his own including *Anticipation of the Night*, *Window Water Baby Moving*, and the *Dog Star Man* cycle — tracing how the perceptual claims of the title essay are worked out shot by shot. ## Details ### Concepts and Theories - [[Flicker and Entoptics]] - the book's argument for an "untutored eye" and its embrace of closed-eye, hypnagogic vision as legitimate cinematic subject matter is a founding text for this concept ### Creative and Technical Practices - [[Drawn on Film]] - the prose-poetic method of the book enacts, in writing, the same rejection of received convention that drives Brakhage's hand-painted and scratched-on-film practice ### Related Individuals - [[Stan Brakhage]] - author; his central theoretical statement, cited throughout his own page and across secondary sources - [[Jonas Mekas]] - published the book as a special issue of *Film Culture* (No. 30, Spring 1963) - [[P. Adams Sitney]] - leading critical interpreter of the book, situating it within his account of American visionary/lyrical film ## References ### Cited In - [[Stan Brakhage]] (230 - Individuals) - quotes the book's opening passage (via [[Light Moving in Time]]) as his central theoretical statement