Consider the strange history of the lyrical film. We can, according to its christener and chief exegete, identify the advent of this form with uncommon specificity: the creation by Stan Brakhage, in 1959, of Anticipation of the Night. “The lyrical film,” P. Adams Sitney writes, “postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film.” Its means of achieving this are, again, gratifyingly specific: “it proposes camera movement as the elementary figure of filmic structure.” And while Sitney’s investment in both Brakhage’s centrality to American film culture and his own role in promoting that narrative are enough to prompt second thoughts, I can nonetheless see little reason to argue with his claim that the lyrical mode came to be so common within the New American Cinema—the avant-garde which blossomed across the mid-to-late ’60s and into the following decade—that “it seemed that that way of filmmaking was completely natural and must have existed ab origine.”
By the early ’80s though, this mode, whose look continues to signify “experimental film” in the popular imagination, had grown stale, staid. Outside of Brakhage’s own steadily evolving work, it largely produced academic exercises, and this remains the case through the present day. It presumably says something that, across dozens of essays over the last decade, I have only once written about a filmmaker primarily involved in making lyrical work (Joseph Bernard, whose last films date from the mid-’80s)—at the very least, it says something about recent curatorial taste. But I must also note that the ethos of the artist as “first-person protagonist” has endured in spite of the withering of the form from which it was initially inextricable. It can be found throughout two dominant types of the present moment: the diary film (drawn from Mekas and Robertson, who both learned much from Brakhage), and a still-nameless kind of associative montage, often obliquely personal, which owes at least as much to prolonged exposure to algorithms as it does to the films of the ’60s and ’70s it superficially resembles. The hand of the filmmaker, particularly in the best of this work, rarely shows; expression, when not suppressed entirely, is found in the world, rather than imposed by the handling of the camera.
There have, naturally, been exceptions. Nathaniel Dorsky, by isolating the expressive work at the level of the fingers adjusting the aperture, has produced a refinement of Brakhage’s full-body gestures which marks out an entirely new trajectory for the lyric. A host of others—Phil Solomon, Paul Clipson, Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, to name a few—have expanded its possibilities in ways no less meaningful for being minor. And while the artists of my own generation have tended to borrow only as much from this approach as they need, a small but significant group of
