(• • •) OR ELLIPSES

This work is in five reels (numbered, but called «reels» so that they don't take the connotations of «Parts» - thus each simply a part of «trail» of colored scratches, white scratches on black & white leader which suggest, to me, a passage). (...) The fifth reel is the only one which has a sound track; but of course that makes the whole work a «SOUND film» because the audio track must be turned-on from the beginning.
«Brakhage's new series of scratch-and-stain films, known as (. . .) OR ELLIPSES, are among other things, a visual analogue to Abstract Expressionism. The onrushing imagery and the spatial conundrums it creates evoke not only Pollock but also the work of Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, and even Mark Rothko - that is Pollock et al, at 24 frames per second. Eschewing the camera, Brakhage scrapes away the film emulsion to create a thicket (or sometimes a spider's web) of white lines and rich chemical colors. Some segments of the original footage appear to have been printed on negative stock or perhaps solarized - so that the blue and pink lines are inscribed on a white field. In any case, (. . .) is a cosmos. Rich without being ingratiating, the effect is one of rythmic conflagration.
A second 20-minute reel is more staccato - mad chicken-scratch calligraphy fluttering out of a yellow void, sketchy lightning bolts or fireworks interrupted by a sudden field of turquoise (...)». Jim Hoberman, Perfectly correct, S.B.