Faust Collection

This is the realization of a 30 year old dream, a wish of the young filmmaker to film a modern Faust which finally came to a fulfillment as unpredictable and as absolute as, say, three decades of living experience. Like earlier artists who have treated the Faust legend,he uses it to explore the nature of obsession. But reversing the familiar idea of Faust as an old man yearning to be young, Brakhage makes him a world-weary young man who longs to be old... What makes the film striking is its rich imagery, superbly photographed in dark-hued tones, and its insistent visual rhythms. Brakhage is close to his peak as a bard of the camera and the editing table. – David Sterritt

“Faust Part 2” reveals the modern Faust in a romantic interlude, an idyll (from the Greek idein, "to see"); also, a journey of the id. A sense of story is inferred through the complex interweaving of human gesture, expression, and bodily movement within vibrantly shifting colours and rhythmic development, creating multiple levels of metaphorical meaning. A collaborative work with paintings by Emily Ripley and soundtrack by Joel Haertling.

Just as the word Idyll of Faust's Part 2 is rooted in the Greek idein/to see, so is "candida" in candidatus, as used in the white robed army of martyrs' of the Te Deum, as well as Albicare/to be white or Albicore out of the Portuguese (or Arabic origin) designating a kind of tunny (or white man): thus, Faust's 3 is white/white as well as (from sugar's white) candy, and fish: it is the modern Walpurgisnacht to Faust, but the day-dream of his Emily: it exists that a woman has, finally, something of her ritual included in the myth of Faust..... and that muthos/mouth become a vision.

Music by Rick Corrigan. This is the imaged thought process of young Faust escaping the unbearable pictures of his broken romantic idyll, mentally fleeing the particulars of his dramatized "love," Faust's mind ranging the geography of his upbringing and its structures of cultural hubris – the whole nervous system "going to ground" and finally "becoming one" with the hypnagogically visible cells of his receptive sight and inner cognition ... all that I could give him of Heaven in this current visualization of these ancient themes. Films