Water as a verb: A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea, by Stan Brakhage

In 1988, Stan Brakhage started a cycle of films inspired by his wife: Marilyn’s Window, Untitled Film (For Marilyn) or the series Vancouver Island Films, which evokes the topography of a place, the ocean around Victoria and the stages of Marilyn’s life refracted in the fabric of the sea. A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea relates to her childhood, The Mammals of Victoria to her adolescence and The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him with her mid-life crisis.

In A Child’s Garden..., Brakhage returns to the discovery of world events and initial glimpses: the body’s waves and tides combine with the interaction of light and water, matching their ripples and currents, changing the surfaces from opaque to transparent. With cuts and black fadeouts or different types of film, speed, exposure or emulsion, tamed nature (gardens and playgrounds) and the marine primary state, they are evenly transfigured between the first and second person.

A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea, Stan Brakhage, 1991, 16 mm, silent, 73 min