Sincerity (I, II, III, IV, V)

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5 episodes:

Sincerity I (1973 - 27') - This, the first completed reel of work-in-progress, draws on autobiographical energies and images which reflect the first 20 years of my living. I have three definitions of the word "sincerity" to sustain my working along these lines of thought with this autobiographical material: 1) Ezra Pound's marvelous mistranslation of a Chinese ideogram - "Sincerity ... the sun's lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally" ... (of which I would change, for my purposes, the last word to "visually"), 2) Robert Creeley's trace-of-the-word for me on the back of a Buffalo restaurant menu - "Sym-keros ... same-growth (Ceres) create ... of the same growth," and 3) Hollis Frampton's track-of-it to "the greek," viz - "a glazed pot (i.e., one which will hold water)." This film might best be seen, then, as a graph of light equivalent to autobiographical thought process.

Sincerity II (1975 - 27') - This continuation of my autobiography is composed of film photographed by many people: Bruce Baillie, Jane Brakhage, Larry Jordan and Stan Phillips, among others. Most of the footage is drawn from some 20,000 feet of "home movies", "out-takes" and the like, salvaged from my photography over the years. It is of the Brakhage family's coming into being. It is composed in the light of those electrical traces we call "memory"; and it is as true to that "thought process" as I was enabled to make it. This project was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sincerity III (1978 - 35') - In the autobiographical tradition of the earlier Sincerities, this film takes up the light-threads of our living 14 years ago when the Brakhage family found home and "settled," like they say, into some sense of permanence. This quality of living in one place tends to destroy most senses of chronology: thus, along lines-of-thought of growing and shifting physicality, events can seem to be occuring simultaneously (a thot-process 'kin to that of "The Domain of the Moment"), and the memory of such a time IS prompted and sustained by details of living usually overlooked or taken-for-granted (such as Proust's cookie which prompted "The Remembrance of Things Past"). Michael McClure's "Fleas" and Andrew Noren's "The Exquisite Corpse I" were additional sources of inspiration for the making of this work.

Sincerity IV (1980 - 40') - This, the sixth film of the Sincerity / Duplicity series, seems rooted in the earliest tradition of my work, Psycho-Drama, as well as in the most recent, Imagnostic, directions taken. It is remembrance as well as thought which fashions it in lonely hotel rooms, sincere return of the mind to that which is loved, ephemeral faces of children growing older, familiar objects interwoven with easy alien familiarity, the images of strangers in UNeasy identification, sexual posture and the lure of the Beloved as irreducible image.

Sincerity V (1980 - 45') - This, then, finishes eleven years of editing drawing on 30-some years of photography. I will surely work autobiographically again, but the modes of Sincerity and Duplicity seem completed with this film which on the one hand is as simple in its integrity-of-light as those follow-the-ball "sing-along" early silent movies and on the other as complicated as teen-age metamorphosis. Childhood dissolves in flame, struck from the hearth.
(Stan Brakhage)