"Metaphors on Vision", Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) was an American avant-garde filmmaker. His approach to cinema was heavily experimental and non-narrative, having painted and scratched celluloid, used camera handheld and multiple exposures, while exploring the rhythms in the editing through fast cutting techniques. His film is more sensory, exploring subjects like mythology (Dog Star Man cycle), the birth (Window Water Baby Moving) or death. Although the narrative's absence did not allow him to reach a large audience, his poetic cinema was acclaimed and became widely influential. Metaphors on Vision is his statement on the visual experience, written in a very idiosyncratic style.

Excerpts:

"Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspec- tive, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered  in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green?' How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can the eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'be- ginning was the word.'"

"All of my experimentation in film has been directed toward the discovery of ways of expression as non-related as possible to other art form expressions. I am after pure film art forms, forms in no way dependent upon imitation of existing arts nor dependent upon the camera used as the eye. I do not want films to show, as in existing documentary (the only direction film has taken to free itself from photographed drama) but to transform images so that they exist in relation to the film only as they flash onto the screen ...exist in their own right, so to speak."

Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dGqbbQX2iLghcnV0r1HXOhAv5Brtrg5u/view?usp=sharing