Mothlight (1963) User Reviews

I'm beginning to see the light

[mheuermann · 7/10 · 1 February 2006]

It's rather tricky to rate and review a 4 minute film but I'm gonna try anyway. From the very beginning so called "experimental film" has dealt with the material of the film as such and there is a whole tradition of films made without the help of a camera. You can scribble on it, you can scratch it or as it was done here, you can glue two dimensional and transparent objects to it, then sandwich the negative onto it and let it run past a light source in order to expose it. Some people still think that film depicts reality, whereas all it really does is depict a reproduction of reality. But surely there must be another reality than what Hollywood is trying to sell us and Brakhage's approach is as simple as it is beautiful. In Mothlight wings of insects and thin leaves flutter over the screen and since each frame has no relation to it's preceding image, the outcome is rather fidgety. However, if you relax and stay focused at the same time you will realise that watching Mothlight is like staring at a bright light that is surrounded by moths. When I watched it for the first time, I thought the effect was rather impressive. You might argue that you don't go to the movies to watch moths flutter around bright lights but there is so much more to it. Experimantal film has always questioned our way of perceiving the world and Mothlight is no exception. Only it's also very beautiful and thus very entertaining.

Lights ... Action

[ackstasis · 5/10 · 27 December 2008]

I've just watched 'Mothlight (1963)' - my first film from the Stan Brakhage - twice in a row, and I'm no closer to working it out. Experimental filmmakers usually have some purpose in mind with their work, some aesthetic or thematic goal to which they are aspiring. What the case may be with 'Mothlight' is beyond me. I've heard some critics venture that it represents the world as experienced through a moth's eyes, but how this is achieved by gluing plants and dead insects onto celluloid is another matter. Certainly the most interesting facet of this four-minute short is that it was produced entirely without a camera, Brakhage having attached the organic fragments directly to the filmstrip. Is there beauty in these images? To a certain degree, I think, but each frame darts by so incredibly quickly that its difficult to appreciate what you are seeing. Every jarring movement is like being awakened from a dream, several times a second, such that you end up not getting any dreaming done at all.

I've probably committed a mortal sin by adding music to a film that is presumably supposed to be silent, but I thought that Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" actually brought an agreeable rhythm to the continuous stream of shifting images. This result, now that I think of it, is probably the antithesis of what Brakhage had intended, for, viewed alone, his animation (which effectively re-animates the dead, as one author put it) has a jarring feel about it, as though you're driving and insects keep splatting against your windscreen, bringing your vehicle to a standstill at every jolt. Film is a medium that relies upon light for its existence, and its light-created images often have the power to captivate and entrance us – just as a moth is drawn instinctively towards the glow of a lantern. In a way, I suppose, it is the audience that is the moth in this case, seated in the darkness, our attention lured towards the images of light on the cinema screen. Heck, I already feel like I'm reading too far into it.

Good Idea/Colorful but Dull

[Hitchcoc · 5/10 · 13 May 2019]

We see the world through butterfly wings. Every millisecond another colorful wing passes before us. It isn't long before we want to go outside and get some fresh air. It's just not that interesting because there is no real center.

a short movie without the use of a camera

[red-128 · 9/10 · 3 October 1999]

No camera was used to make this dazzling short movie: legs, wings and other parts of butterflies were glued directly on the filmstrip, thus creating a shifting pattern of unsurpassed beauty. The way Brakhage extents the possibilities of his medium is typical of 1960's experimental film-making.

One of Brakhage's most famous

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 29 September 2013]

I have to admit I'm often struggling with the work of director Stan Brakhage. I'd probably get a real kick out of some of his works if I watched them in slow-motion, because most, if not all, of them are visually mesmerizing if you could actually follow what is going on and what the director is exactly depicting. In this short film which runs roughly three-and-a-half minutes and is among his most famous pieces, he takes on the subject of insects. It's a silent film as always, so you can pick a piece of music you love and listen to it at the same time to maybe improve the effect this film has on you. It's not as colorful as most of Brakhage's other work, although it gets more as the film continues. Most of it is in beige, probably to signify the color of the insects or their origins to Mother Earth. It seemed to me as if there is a bit more color round the middle part of this film, so the 100-minute mark, but maybe it was just me. The rest is greyish and brownish. Then again, this is about moths and not butterflies. Despite all the negative things, one has to add however that even 50 years after this film was made in 1963, Brakhage is still considered one of the big names in animation history and his style is truly unique to this day. If for the right or wrong reasons is up to you to decide. For me it is a clear no and on rewatch I am tempted to give this film an even lower rating, namely a 1 out of 5 instead of a 2 out of 5, which would mean that I categorize it as a bad film and not just something between poor and forgettable. But I will be generous today and leave it at 2. However, the chance I will ever watch it again is close to zero. If you do not even watch it once, you are doing it right I would say. As I stated earlier, it is kinda interesting to see what the screen shows when you pause it for a second, but this is of course not an option if you discuss the film as a whole. After all, it is called motion pictures. The creativity here I cannot really see at all and not just epileptics may wanna skip it, but everybody else too. Brakhage's signature at the end (blink and you will miss it) is almost more interesting than everything before that.

Gluing the World on a Film Strip

[p_radulescu · 10/10 · 15 January 2011]

Brakhage was intimate with his camera and with the world seen by his camera from the very beginning. And from a certain moment on he felt the camera was of no more use between him and the world. He started to put the world directly on the film, either by painting it, scratching it, or by physically gluing the world there, like in this 4 minute movie from 1963, Mothlight. It could sound crazy to you, but Brakhage collected patiently hundreds of moth wings from the inside of lamps and windows, added parts of leaves and other detritus and sandwiched them between two filmstrips. The outcome was the life of a moth, from birth to death: a dance of patterns on the wings, of psychedelic beauty. The world of butterflies, as seen by the light bulb; or the fascination in the eyes of butterflies deadly attracted by the light bulb; or the fascination of us in watching the screen.

You could ask, is this the real world? Of course not, this is the world created by the imagination of Brakhage. An artist creates universes on his own, he is some kind of God (or Frankenstein, matter of perspective), and the only criteria for us to judge should be the consistency of the world we see on the screen, on the canvas, in a book (or the world we listen to when in a concert hall).

...wow...

[Douglass29 · 17 March 2003]

Finding Brakhage was an accident, but when I did stumble upon his world, I shut the door to the "Hollywood" world, and I sat down in the dark, to watch Brakhage. MOTHLIGHT was the first one I saw, and MOTHLIGHT was all I needed to see in the beginning before I wanted to get into experimental film. It traps you and doesn't let you go. Those who have seen it, know what I'm talking about. It's something amazing, and something everyone needs to experience at least once. **** four stars.

Scrapbooking for Film Makers...

[voltage11 · 1/10 · 19 April 2005]

I tend to share the same sentiments as the commenter who saw Mothlight for a film studies class. I, too, watched it in my film studies course and while it was neat to think that he actually pasted leaves and wings onto the celluloid, it made me dizzy. Through discussion in my class, I learned that this was supposed to make me see these objects in a way I never have or maybe ever would again. But, all I saw was the meshing of blades of grass and moth wings. While some may see this as highly artistic, I really cannot. It's like paying for a tour of the art museum and being shown a white canvas with a red dot on it. I believe art takes true talent, and I can't help but wonder how many fourth graders could have a scavenger hunt outside and then cut and paste what they find onto strips of film. If you can find deep meanings and revelations in rapid images, then you would probably like this film. But, for those who see art (especially film art) as an avenue for conveying a message rather than leaving open interpretation for confused audience members, you may just want to watch it for visual stimulation if you watch it at all.

textures

[ngruber-1 · 8/10 · 24 May 2006]

Brakhage made this piece by physically placing moth wings and other things to white leader and fixing them in place with splicing tape. interesting to watch this because it reminds us how trained we are to look for narrative and pattern in everything we see. i found myself searching for redundancies, trying to "figure out" what was going on. I then allowed myself to just sit back and let myself be transported by the material. Made me feel like I'ma little insect zipping through the grass in a field. Like Brakhage's other works, it is very much a collage projected versus what we traditionally call a film. Not unlike more static visual arts like painting and photography where we allow ourselves to get to the meaning alone as opposed to being given the meaning by the author.

Winging it.

[st-shot · 3/10 · 21 February 2021]

Stan Brakhage presents us with some hermetically sealed imagery in this "scrapic" that he made by taping particles onto celluloid. He gets an A for audacity and imagination but the follow through is more accessible than his abstract work with firmly identifiable objects and bereft of the more nebulous nature to be found in more challenging works such as his anemic preludes where if you've seen one you've seen them all. Akin to having a file drawer of x-rays falling on you.

True "Art"

[akhan41 · 23 June 2004]

The comments already listed for this film are perfect, but I just wanted to add is that this isn't so much a film as much as it is functional art. If the definition of "art film" can roughly be put as anything on film that breaks the traditional Hollywood narrative (clearly defined protagonist with clear-cut goals and every scene of the film relating to the obtaining of / confinement of those goals), then this film is pretty much the benchmark for how broad that definition is. Not exactly a "must see," but important because it gives us language with which to talk about "art film" in general.

This changed my very perception of what cinema can be.

[zachgriffiths-57958 · 10/10 · 17 March 2019]

This movie changed my life. There is so much layered symbolism and deep motifs contained in this short film. I feel like I can now become a truly better person through what I learned in "Mothlight." This should be a film required for every man, woman, and child to watch.

Buggy editing

[Quinoa1984 · 10/10 · 3 May 2016]

According to someone else on here this was made without a camera - Brakhage took pieces of moths, their wings, parts, and through how the light of the projector itself casts it we see all of the movements going by (albeit the editing is all Brakhage and how he chooses the "shots", however that went). In that sense it's simply a unique piece of cinema that literally, not as a figure of speech, changes the form of the medium. Of course there's no story, and how could there be, but as a collage of images it's extraordinary.

Perhaps there could be a way to make these four minutes into something that wouldn't be compelling (maybe if there was too much white space on the film-strips, again the film strips are still cut together so there's a process there in the fully artistic sense not unlike Jackson Pollock sprinkling paint around to make an effect). I can't think of it off the top of my head; the fact that it's using nature itself seems like some sort of subliminal comment about how to really appreciate things we need to look at them, ALL of them, and digest the images later.

Changed My Life Forever

[frankdai-22379 · 10/10 · 20 September 2023]

When I just started watching this movie, I only had two balls, one of them defunct. However, while the movie played, my balls started undergoing a cloning process just like the cells of the moth wings that I could definitely see due to the EXPERT videography.

Edit: I just found out from my doctor when I did my last physical that I have testicular cancer and that the ball I thought I developed is actually a HUGE FKING tumor. Apparently the doctor said it was "inoperable" and that "he was sorry". Well, the only person he should be sorry for is himself for missing out on watching this masterpiece of a movie.

Edit 2: I was just informed that I was in "Stage 3" now, which is a good thing right? I heard that that is usually the last stage that cancer patients try to beat. In the meantime, this movie has endless room for interpretation that I can transform into my 1000 page book "Mothlight, Testicular Cancer, and Me: How I fell in love with pieces of dead-moth wings, dirt, and roots"

Good

[Michael_Elliott · 9 July 2008]

Mothlight (1968)

*** (out of 4)

Here's a director I had never heard of until reading some of Martin's reviews so I did a little searching and came across this film, which is a strange one to say the least and even after watching it I had to read other reviews just to understand what I had seen. From what I gathered, the director didn't use a camera but instead used parts of a butterfly, taped them to a film strip and that's the entire movie. The film runs just under three minutes and we see all sorts of strange things that my writing talent wouldn't allow me to do justice to. Since this was my first film by the director I can't say I totally understood what he was trying to do but I enjoyed what I was watching. The various images, shapes and creations the director comes up with was very entertaining.

A Wild Ride

[joshuahaskell · 10/10 · 17 March 2019]

This movie was...surprising. The gimmick of not even using a camera in filming is definitely a good thing. As the moths, leaves and roots fly by, you will find your mind rising to a different place, where humans and nature co-exist in peace.

Overall, this movie is a buy. A definite buy.