A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea

The title of this experimental film draws a line between two different film sequences, firstly, the child’s garden, which can be seen as a naive and colorful dime light. Only for seconds the scenes in the garden occur – people standing around are not to be seen clearly, there is also a fine tuning of illumination, Stan Brakhage doesn’t want to show a constant picture, it is more than that, a poetic fragment of trashy light. Secondly, this film is an eloge to the sea, the antithesis of the playing child, is the serious movement of the life-bearing sea, graphically the life ends with the death, shown in the last sequence, in which a raven picks out the flesh of a dead, not clearly recognizable animal. The constant movement of the sea is ended by the abrupt fading of light. Filmed with a hand camera the foam and brightness of water are clothed by poetic cuts an the ending into the black of fading down.