I... Dreaming

Stan Brakhage was always intensely dissatisfied with the conventional uses of sound and music in cinema. He studied with John Cage and Edgard Varèse, searching for a new relationship between image and sound and with the idea of, thus, “creating a new dimension for the soundtrack.” However, the more informed he became of the aesthetics of sound, the less he began to feel any need for an audio accompaniment to the visuals he was making. Instead, he developed a concept of music as the “sound equivalent of the mind’s moving”. Out of nearly 400 films made between 1952 and 2003, I… Dreaming is one of around only 30 which have a soundtrack. The rest are silent. It is set to a sound piece by Joel Haertling, member of the experimental music collective Architect’s Office (also featuring Rick Corrigan, another Brakhage collaborator). The piece is a melancholic collage based on recurring fragments of songs by Stephen Forster, referring to loss of love in the popular “torch song” mode. The film, described by Brakhage as “my self-in-crisis portrait”, envisions a re-awakening of such senses of love as children know best, as it posits - along a line of words scratched in the film - the maddening experience of waiting and longing. (Stoffel Debuysere)