Tortured Dust (1984)

Stan Brakhage, central figure in US avant-garde cinema, lived from the early sixties in Rollinsville, Colorado, with his wife and children, isolated in the mountains. There, he developed a highly personal and lyrical cinema, centred on his family: a series of autobiographical films that he entitled The Book of the Family. Tortured Dust was the end of this cycle. Filmed throughout three years in the eighties, at the heart of a household in crisis, it is his longest and most moving home movie. Using a hand-held camera, a rhythmic, intricate editing process and touches of psychodrama, the film portrays with insight and distance their everyday life. Through windows, mirrors, flashes of colour and chiaroscuro, Brakhage records his children leaving home, the lack of communication and the breakdown of his marriage.