I’ll admit it. I didn’t understand Stan Brakhage’s video at all. For at least the first three times I watched it. But then I started to ask myself why the video was 2 1/2 minutes long, why he would compose the images in that way, and why he titled the video “Stellar”.
I did a bit of Googling on Brakhage’s films when I was stumped the first time, and I found a wiki archive that listed several of the films he had done, and their lengths. To answer the last question first, I think there’s a point to why that particular video is nearly 2 1/2 minutes long. It tells a story. The film begins very slowly, and I believe this is a parallel to the beginning of time, or life. The span of time between images is long, as is the amount of time that you see any specific image. However, as it progresses, the time between images shortens and the images flash by faster than the viewer can keep up with. I think this parallel is a signal of how time progresses and seems to pass us by so quickly near the end that we do not take the time to enjoy the things we see.
Secondly, I was unsure how the video related at all to the Gestalt principles. The grouping of images seems random at first, but when I paid closer attention to ways that they could be categorized, I noticed that they had predominantly cool, dark colors. This of course is reflective of our perceptions of what the universe looks like beyond the atmosphere of the earth.
Additionally, the proximity of images changes. Like I mentioned before with time, the images seem more distant from each other in the beginning, but by the end of the video they are nearly split seconds apart.
Brakhage’s choice of composition still confuses me, and watching other videos of his doesn’t help, but I eventually opened my mind to the abstractedness of the work and was able to appreciate his unique creativity and composition.