LO-05: The Dante Quartet

The Dante Quartet (1987) is an 8-minute experimental short film by Stan Brakhage. Produced over the course of six years, Brakhage hand-painted random but organized images on top of film with the aim of capturing various stages of hell. The Dante Quartet is divided into four sections: Hell Itself, Hell Spit Flexion, Purgation, and existence is song, comprising thousands of paintings – all of which can be characterized as emotive and intentional yet utterly random in their framing and order. As Brakhage splotches thick paint across his film, frames them, orders them, and edits them in a way that subverts the audience’s expectations (namely, the expectation that film must be explicitly narrative & played at consistent frame rates), he creates an experimental masterpiece that transcends both the canvas and the screen. The randomness within The Dante Quartet is visceral; watching the film as a spectator feels like witnessing a sort of organized chaos, taking us through the various stages of descension as Brakhage mapped out. That’s exactly what I admire about Brakhage’s work- through manipulating the random and rearranging them in a harmonious manner, Brakhage conveys emotion in an artful way that cannot be championed.