Yggdrasill : Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind
Stan Brakhage, USA, 1997, 17 min

This film, a combination of hand painting and photography, is a fulsome exposition of the themes of “Dog Star Man.” In that early epic I had envisioned The World Tree as dead, fit only for firewood; and at the end “Dog Star Man” I had chopped it up amidst a flurry of stars (finally Cassiopeia’s Chair): now, these many years later, I am compelled to comprehend Yggdrasill as rooted in the complex electrical synapses of thought process, to sense it being alive today as when Nordic legend hatched it. I share this compulsion with Andrei Tarkovsky, whose last film “The Sacrifice” struggles to revive The World Tree narratively, whereas I simply present (one might almost say “document”) a moving graph to approximate my thought process, whereby The Tree roots itself as the stars we, reflectively, are. (SB)

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