The Stained Glass Window Form - Text 1
The Stained Glass Window Form, by Vincent Deville
It was Stan Brakhage who may have inaugurated the stained glass window form when, in Dog Star Man (1962), he punched a hole in the centre of the photograms, reglued fragments of the film stock back into the hole, and made appear in the mouth of his infant child a second image of the same child, thereby intensifying the initial motif. Other filmmakers have followed in his footsteps by removing and replacing parts of the image using various cutting tools (punches, scalpels, perforators, etc.), developing gluing and joining techniques of their own (using glue, scotch tape, ink, etc.) in order to achieve a singular montage aesthetic in the frame and the shot. The stained glass form, a cross between surrealist collage, mosaics and inlaid woodworking, is an iconoclastic gesture, one which does not limit itself to carrying out editing cuts between images but rather extends them to within the frame of the photogram, breaking both the content of the image and its base in order to recompose them. We also see a stained glass aesthetic in the arrangement of the fragments, the use of transparency and the taste for bringing out the colours.
We find in the stained glass window form a two-fold analytical dimension: that of the motifs and that of the base. David Matarasso, as he put it during the interview conducted with him,[4] studies the image’s “lines of force” to carry out his cutting up.
