Synopsis
One of Brakhage’s best-known works, this shows the home birth of Brakhage’s first child. It has been used by maternity centers and natural childbirth groups over the years and has helped change attitudes towards the father’s presence during birth. Filming the event, Brakhage has said, was his way of being present. Though the film follows the chronology of the birth to some extent, it also disrupts it frequently, a subjective representation of Brakhage’s expectation, nervous anticipation and wonder, and of his wife’s labor.
A word from Tënk
1958, at a time when men were not even allowed in birthing rooms, Brakhage defied the rules and decided, in collaboration with his wife Jane Wodening and their doctor, to film the arrival of their first child. A work that has become mythical, not least because of the scandal it initially provoked, it depicts childbirth in a frontal and total manner. But the real aesthetic shock it provokes is not due to the spectacular aspect of the images - baby expelled from the vagina, bloody placenta, cutting of the umbilical cord - but to the blissful representation of Love. The expressive power of the images, reinforced by the absence of a soundtrack, the construction of poetic visual metaphors and the deconstructed structure of the event keep the viewer at a standstill, as if drawn by force into a vertiginous tunnel from which he or she emerges stunned, heart pounding, witness to the grandiose miracle of birth. A long love song, a primitive cry of happiness, it remains one of the rare cinematographic representations of the female body giving birth. Let's hope that, with a fair representation of women in cinema, this immemorial act will no longer be relegated to the medical ranks, but will be able to unfold in all its symbolic and existential significance.
Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director
