Waving pictures and nasty Chinese lanterns

The title of this experimental film draws a line between two different film sequences, firstly, the child's garden, which can be seen as a naive and colorful dime light. Only for seconds the scenes in the garden occur - people standing around are not to be seen clearly, there is also a fine tuning  of illumination, Stan Brakhage doesn't want to show a constant picture, it is more than that, a poetic fragment of  trashy light. Secondly, this film is an eloge to the sea, the antithesis of the playing child, is the serious movement of the life-bearing sea, graphically the life ends with the death, shown in the last sequence, in which a raven picks out the flesh of a dead, not clearly recognizable animal. The constant movement of the sea is ended by the  abrupt fading of light. Filmed with a hand camera the foam and brightness of water  are clothed by poetic cuts an the ending into the black of fading down.

In his description for A CHILD'S GARDEN, Brakhage quotes from poets Ronald Johnson and Charles Olson.

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A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea

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