Stan Brakhage - The Machine of Eden

’The Machine of Eden’, a film by Stan Brakhage, is an example of formal conceptualization of ’american wide open space’ grasped into the 16mmm frame. A telephoto lens flattens the space by rapid movements in order to create a new abstract plastic cut of the landscapes. That’s a real recognition in a bucolic old America: the skies, the plains, the animals photographed in a sort of no-space tactile, visceral sensory experience. An associative ’dreamscape’ is shimmering across the eye. The metrics of this film anticipates the heuristic attitude of structural cinema.