Dog Star Man: Part III (1964) Poster

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10/10
Brakhage "Porn"
Quinoa19843 May 2016
If one pictures the act of sex happening, one may think about a person's face during the act or their breasts or their hair. And of course when it comes to pornography in cinema you get many close-up shots of genitalia connecting and going in-out and so on, and other times if it's only one genitalia or another then it's simply seeing the man's or the woman's.

For Dog Star Man Part III, which is supposed to be from what Brakhage said in some interview somewhere the part of the protagonist's (mountain climber?) sexuality flourishing, this can mean different things to different people. But what that means for Brakhage is that his own "porno" is most graphic in the interior-biological sense and, as one may happen when sex occurs, things fly by so quick as to barely be able to think straight.

This is my favorite part of the series, I think in large part because the focus is around a key subject - human sexuality and the process of copulation - but the abstractness of the images, how fast everything goes by and yet how I can discern and recognize so many things makes it intimate in ways that are hard to describe. This is where I can *feel* the imagery, more than just an intellectual escapade like some of the other parts or where things simply flow over me. And in its own way it's paradoxically extremely sensual and coarse in how its produced.

Here I felt engaged with the art that speaks to something that is essential and primordial. Human beings need to have sex in order to procreate, but the key thing is that sex is... messy, for lack of a better word. This is a messy movie that moves fast and feels rough and raw and the scratches on the film obscure just enough so that we know what's going on and yet it all culminates in... a heart-beat, whether it's the man's or the woman's or, maybe, the life that's just created, who knows? I loved every second.
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2/10
No idea why this is so popular
Horst_In_Translation11 August 2015
Warning: Spoilers
This is the third and penultimate sequence from director Stan Brakhage's original "Dog Star Man" series. It runs for over 8 minutes and is one of the shorter segments. This is, however, apparently also the only good thing I can say about it. It's a truly boring watch and as almost always with Brakhage's films it's pretty much impossible to see what's going on between the quick succession of flickering images. There is apparently some sexual content in this one here, but it's not too easy to actually see it. All I saw was one female breast I think. The film is silent like all the other sequences and just like the rest Brakhage made this roughly 50 years ago when he was around 30. I may be a bit biased as I am not too big on him in general, but I really can see no quality filmmaking in the majority of his works at all, this one included. Not recommended.
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