Richard asked:

"Do you consider Landow's FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF CLARIFIED
BUTTER a Gnostic film?"

Well, it's quite a great film, I know that. It's also one of the
strangest films I've ever seen. And he made a later film, "Bardo
Follies," that's also related to the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" -- he
even called it some kind of adaptation, I think, and there are bubbly
images that perhaps describe passing between worlds. It's actually more
explicitly a light film than "The Film That Rises," but light isn't so
important in quite that way in his later films.

My knowledge of Gnosticism is not as refined as it should be but I think
that the created world is the physical world. The true "Fall" occurred
with the creation of the physical world that imprisoned us. It's not
consciousness that deludes us but matter that entraps us, though for
some a change in consciousness might help free the "spark."

Richard wrote:

"I've always understood Brakhage's films as being attempts to show the
data from the senses in a fresh way, namely that in films like TEXT OF
LIGHT he's showing objects in such as way as to reveal the true nature
of the object as luminous and manifesting 'the divine spark' (or in the
Buddhist context, 'suchness.')"

His films are complicated and more than most susceptible to multiple
interoperations, but I agree with your description as one of the main
ones for many of the films. Also, the arc of his career from the mid-50s
to about 1980 structures itself, in part, as a quest to free light.

Totally off topic, and with apologies to those who may have heard it
already: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? "Make me one
with everything."

- Fred