Visions in Meditation

This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein's "Stanzas In Meditation", in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes and human symbolism "indicative of that field-of-consciousness within which humanity survives thoughtfully." It is a film "as in a dream," this first film in a proposed series of such being composed of images shot in the New England states and Eastern Canada. It begins with an antique photograph of a baby and ends with a child loose on the landscape, interweaving images of Niagara Falls with a variety of New England and Eastern Canadian scenes, antique photographs, windows, old farms and cityscapes, as it moves from deep winter, through glare ice, to thaw.

Visiting the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado, abandoned about 1275, Brakhage thought, "There is terror here." And so he returns again and again to those empty stone homes.

Brakhage begins here with Carlsbad Caverns as a stand-in for Plato's Cave and then responds to the philosopher's notion of inaccessible ideal forms by seeking out imagery that evokes worlds we cannot see.

Photographing near Taos, New Mexico, where D.H. Lawrence lived, and in the room in which his ashes may be entombed, Brakhage also cites a statement of the writer's in connection with the film: "There must be mutation swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without denouement or close."