The Brakhages’ dog died, and this is what followed. A good subject, I think, for a family that had its babies at home back in the 1950s. For all of us, actually, who through modernity and advanced capitalism have removed ourselves from where our food comes from, where babies come from, and where it all ends up.
Getting carried away there! Back to the film. This isn’t morbid or unseemly, for all that it faces down the facts of physical decay. Rather, it acknowledges. There’s resignation in that acknowledgment, and fearsome prospects even. But there’s a kind of comfort too. This is what awaits us. Since that’s the case, how good it is for us to be together!
Strangely, Sirius Remembered also makes me thing of Robert Burns. He once wrote some verse in honour of a bill that he was in the process of skipping out on. He wrote one tae a haggis, of course. Not to mention to one written in honour of a mouse that he’d just turned over with his plough. The result of that inconsequentiality is incalculable in its penetration and profundity.
My point? As Burns demonstrated, and as the Brakhages are intuiting, any and every subject can be worthy of a poem, or a film. And now that I think of it, that is precisely what differentiates domestic art from, distinguishes domestic art over all that glossy modernity and industrialization, even advanced capitalism can ever offer us.
Mr. Burns: http://bit.ly/1Lk98J9