Don't ask me to describe 'The Dante Quartet (1987),' because I wouldn't know where to start. Painted over six years, an inordinately long time for the prolific Stan Brakhage, the film is a six-minute representation of the afterlife inspired by Dante's "The Divine Comedy" {a work I'm not very familiar with, so please forgive any inaccuracies}. The main character's ascent from Hell is divided into four phases – titled "Hell Itself," "Hell Spit Flexion," "Purgation" and "Existence is Song." The amount of work that must have gone into the film is staggering, with images flickering by at a rate far too rapid to register each frame individually, but that doesn't mean you don't see anything. During the first segment, I started to see Hellish visions that I'm not sure were even there – haggard faces, fallen heroes, rearing steeds and stranded ships. Brakhage plays on the subjective experience of the viewer, subliminally directing their thoughts through his use of colours and brush-strokes. Adding more subconscious layers to the film's narrative is his use of "found footage," with photographs and film (including shots from a worn 70mm print of 'Irma La Douce (1963),' apparently) seeming to "rise to the surface" of the frame. When I first caught the faded vision of a man with sunglasses, I leaned forward scrutinisingly, and it was like discerning the devil in the flicker of television static. Indeed, so uncertain was I of what I'd just seen that I began to doubt my own eyes – perhaps, after all, I'd only caught the silhouette of my reflection in the computer monitor. Seeing isn't believing where Brakhage is concerned.
