Mothlight
- Stan Brakhage |
- 1963 |
- 3 minutes |
- COLOR |
- SILENT
Rental Format(s): 16mm film
Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black.
"Brakhage made MOTHLIGHT without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine." - Jonas Mekas "MOTHLIGHT is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter's struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. MOTHLIGHT is on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being." - Ken Kelman
Awards: Brussels Int'l Film Festival, 1964; Spoleto Film Festival, 1966.
The National Gallery of Art has generously provided funding for a new distribution print of Mothlight now available from Canyon Cinema.