For the first time this year, exf f. will not only take place in the Pupille, but also in the cinema of the Deutsches Filmmuseum. For our first guest screening we have chosen Stan Brakhage's A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea, a rarely screened film by the director.

“From the 1990s onward, Stan Brakhage made almost only hand-painted films, e.g. films in which he painted directly onto the filmstrip. The films that later became known as "Vancouver Island Quartet" are an exception, the first of which is A CHILD'S GARDEN AND THE SERIOUS SEA. Brakhage shot it on Vancouver (Canada) in the garden where his second wife Marilyn had often spent time in her childhood, and on the beach of the sea. These two planes are by no means contrasted, but rather intertwined in many ways. The result is a poetic meditation on childhood and on how a child develops an awareness of the world."

(Winfried Günther)

“In poet Ronald Johnson's great epic Ark, in the first book Foundations, the poem "Beam 29" has this passage: "The seed is disseminated at the gated mosaic a hundred feet / below, above / long windrows of motion / connecting dilated arches undergoing transamplification: / 'seen in the water so clear as christiall' / (prairie tremblante)" which breaks into musical notation that, "presto," becomes a design of spatial tilts: This is where the film began; and I carried a xerox of the still unpublished ARC 50 through 66 all that trip with Marilyn and Anton around Vancouver Island. As I wrote him, "The pun 'out on a limn' kept ringing through my mind as I caught the hairs of side-light off ephemera of objects tangent to Marilyn's childhood: She grew up in Victoria; and there I was in her childhood backyard ...": and then there was The Sea – not as counter-balance but as hidden generator of it all, of the The World to be discovered by the/any child ... as poet Charles Olson has it: "Vast earth rejoices, / deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things, / everything issues from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness / to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead, / the man awake lights up from the sleeping." (Maximus, from "Dogtown - I")” (Stan Brakhage)