The Sunday Morning Movie Presents: A Child’s Garden And The Serious Sea (1991) Run Time: 1H 31M

Welcome gentle readers to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s an experimental piece: A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea.

Next week’s film:

One Eyed Jacks

Reviews of A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea:

Letterboxd says:

With poetry as its seed, this beautiful film germinates as a writing, an inscription of figure and light, outline and shadow, a dance of reflection, a gathering of lumens from blossoms and trees and waters in an intimation of a return to a nostalgic edenic garden from a possible past, ever efflourescing forth from the lentic bed of Okeanos the life-giver. As enshrined also with the artist’s familial warmth vacationing with his wife and son to the place where she grew up, its inexpensive materiality and the sedative, aquamarine character of the content itself, the myriad crescent moons of glint and tearful dewy distance of bokeh, the romanticism afforded by the obliquity of the diaphanous 16mm grain married with its mercurial montage and blind man’s technique, automatic and accidental, tenderly forecloses the mass-cultural aporia of high/low art and the perceptual conflict between representation and object, sign and referent, with an apostatic autonomy that bulwarks against societal and ideological paradigmatics as well as the general sprain of being itself; mimesis in the most originary sense that is in addition remedial. Like the empowering impression of illimitedness in the wonder of a child’s gaze, greater though smaller like Alice, for its lack of clarity its evocation is all the less finite, not just the organic pulse and flicker behind the eye but the life within life, the sacral hieroglyph at the hearth of the inner eye, not simply a mnemonic index but an active imaginary (of an imaginary) that suggests an amniosis, a greater wombality in the post-wombal wilderness, the genitive in the phantasmic, where all the universe is home and the heart beats in rhythm with the sidereal chorus, an eternal essence and predestiny within and without corporeality, another faded world of ichor and jewel liberated from the everyday world of lost content, a world where love speaks what is human together with what is, and where once love is it is always, and there is no death.

and

More than images, more than sensations even…while I watched this it was as though it was the only thing that existed. Made me think about perception in a whole new light, the tree falling in the forest and whatnot; when I watch this – when it’s being perceived – only then is it brought into reality, but in doing so maybe it becomes reality.

After all, this has no meaning or shape or impact outside of the eyes of the viewer. More than any other film maybe, this exists solely to be perceived. I don’t quite know how to put this but at times it’s like it’s a whole other plane of being, establishing the garden and the sea almost as two different, co-existing states of mind. Though despite their emotional, metaphysical quality, the garden and the sea still have a deep sense of place that’s very much tangible; the shots of the sky and the darkness between cuts acting as the more abstract, spiritual spaces.

All I can really say is that while I’m watching this, the rich inner world of the film becomes indistinguishable from my own inner world. I’m inside it and it’s inside me. There were multiple points that made my jaw drop, but surprisingly I never found myself overwhelmed with any kind of visceral reaction (as I sometimes am with Brakhage). It was an altogether very soothing experience, just noticing all the beauty around me. I think what I like most of all is that when the screen goes completely black, the little white spots of noise on the film look like little stars in the night sky.

Without a doubt one of Brakhage’s best.

My take: I realize this isn’t for everyone, but I like to mix things up a bit as you all may have noticed. I find this film to be entrancing, up to a point. Is that light through trees or a school of phosphorescent fish? Is that the light on the ocean, a starfield, or a city’s lights seen from space? It’s often hard to tell and that is the point. It is about ambiguity, dreaminess, and the alien. Don’t try to glean meaning from it, let your mind’s natural instinct for pattern recognition delineate meaning.

The one drawback I found with the film are the scenes of people and buildings. I would have preferred it to be all scenes of nature, I feel like the human aspects break the immersion sharply. I enjoyed watching A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea but I think it’s a one-timer, I’m awarding it a single ⭐.

A note: It’s a silent film and I found it dragged a bit without any sound, so I took the liberty of playing some music to accompany it. I chose the Polish ambient group Mer de Rev’s album How to Disappear Completely, which is also great music to sleep to:

Cinematography: Stan Brakage

There is no plot in this film. It’s just footage Brakage shot while visiting his wife’s childhood home in British Columbia. Here is a description of his work from the YouTube page:

A Film in Two Parts: Innocence and Awe.
This silent, 75-minute epic is a profound meditation on two fundamental modes of perception. The first part, “A Child’s Garden,” is a vibrant, kaleidoscopic evocation of the world as seen through the “untutored eye” of a child. It is a lyrical explosion of color, light, and texture—a joyous, abstract vision of memory, imagination, and the pure wonder of first seeing. The second part, “The Serious Sea,” is a powerful and humbling contrast: a turbulent, majestic, and often terrifying confrontation with the overwhelming, elemental power of nature.

The Art of Painting on Film.
This film is a monumental achievement of handmade cinema. Stan Brakhage did not use a camera. Instead, he worked directly on the celluloid strip itself, painstakingly painting, scratching, dyeing, and even collaging materials like moth wings and flower petals onto the film. His goal was to create a cinema of “closed-eye vision,” to render not what a lens records, but what the mind’s eye sees. The result is an intensely personal and purely visual experience, a direct transmission from the artist’s consciousness to the screen.