Letter from Stan Brakhage to Bob
(6/13/1977)
Thankyou much for Field of Vision - the many copies you sent MUCH appreciated. Your bibliography is the FIRST I've seen which is humanly set up, so that people have some sense of what the writ is aBOUT beFORE
they go and trouble themselves to find it - very beautifully done, Bob.
The Wanda Bershen essay is quite good also, only problem being that there are some obvious errors. It is a shame that such a good essay has these errors (as they don't, anyway, affect the gist of her drift-of-thought they'd be simple to change in case she ever uses this essay again): thus, would you pass my congratulations on to her along with these corrections?
(l) My"use of autobiography" (as she puts it) dates from first film "Interim", inasmuch as I was in love with the girl, was specifically making a 'love song' and (to the point) did metaphor the entire affair we were having WHILE we were having it, with exactitude - same with "Desist-
film" completed a year later (tho' NOT the same with "Unglassed Windows Cast
A Terrible Reflection" in between). This is, admittedly, a debatable 'correction ' .
p. S.
### (It would interest people, I think, to know that Joseph Cornell was MUCH more on mv mind while making "Anticipation of the Night" than ANY other contemporary or classical maker).
(4) "The Art of Vision" ends on single rolls of "Part 4", NOT upon "Prelude with which the film began".
(5) It is Jane in swirling cape, dancing with the donkey, at end of Coda "23rd Psalm Branch", not "daughter".
P.S.(It might interest people to know the "friends" therein are Bob and Bobbie Creeley and children.
(6) This a 'correction' insofar as, and ONLY as, I wish to answer Wanda's surmise that I "would not dissent from Andre Bazin's", etc. I do emphatically dissent, do not care at all for his spirit, "mummy" or otherwise .
Tell Wanda thanks, hello, keen it up, good luck, and send her these notes, if you will.
(2) The word "vision" does NOT, s'far as I'm concerned, encompass
"all sense perception": it refers, as I use it, specifically to the eyes
and the mind's eye. This is NOT a debatable correction.
(3) Suicide, happily, NOT"completed"in "Anticipation of The Night" — see the very LAST shot of that film. Debatable, yes.
June 13, 1977
