Telling Time

Brakhage wrote the essays in Telling Time as an occasional column for Musicworks, a Toronto quarterly. He went beyond the relation of film to music in order to explore primary concerns beyond film, including Brakhage's aesthetic theories based on the phenomenology of human cognition. He is as brilliant discussing Gertrude Stein or romantic love as he is on child psychology, astronomy, and physiology, teasing out vital correspondences between the arts, and upending conventional ideas of how we perceive. His investigations of other artists are models of sympathetic intuition and generosity. He shares his theories, discoveries and understandings in the spirit of establishing a groundwork for many varieties of human liberation. His prose is filled with flashes of insight, elaborated metaphors, playful elisions, shorthand puns and neologisms, personal digressions, surprising epiphanies, leaps of faith, affronts to authority. He invites us to a more profound and personal experience of art.