Eye Myth

Eye Myth (1967)

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Date of release
1967-08-28
TMDB
5.4 / 10 (68)
Runtime
1m
Genres
Animation
Director
Stan Brakhage

Interesting facts

Eye Myth is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage, produced in 1967. The film has a running time of only nine seconds, but took about a year to produce.

Production

Brakhage described the film's title as follows:

In the eyes, constantly, the eyes are flaring with little...stories, little forms and shapes, some of which are quite disturbing, like the swastika...The little myth that's made up of bits and pieces of painted things onto a piece of film that's called an Eye Myth. In other words, it's not a word myth; myth means mouth, actually...but an Eye Myth is kind of beautifully oxymoronic.

Eye Myth's abstract style, achieved by painting images directly onto the film cells, was inspired when Brakhage was diagnosed with a condition causing rapid eye movement. In producing the film, he hoped to achieve a nervous system feedback "through the physiology of the proximity of the eye and the brain". Eye Myth took Brakhage about a year to produce.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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