On demand: "Dog Star Man"

The breakout success of the underground collective billed as Brakhage - husband-and-wife artists Stan and Jane Brakhage - 1964's Dog Star Man proves far less of an endurance test than the later, mortuary-based The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, but may still remain something of a headscratcher: a flickerbook of half-glimpsed, half-digested imagery, composed much like diary entries in five parts shot over three years in the early 1960s, and presented in total silence. What are we looking at? The more pertinent question to ask may be what aren't we looking at, given that some of the answers would seem to include: canine POV footage, flares erupting on the surface of a distant planet, avalanches, landslides and lava flows, glimpses of unidentified cities and forests, surgical footage, cultures being raised in a petridish, the micro set alongside the macro and the metro. You can tell it's an underground film, because for some duration, all we have to latch onto as fully recognisable are hazy shots of human genitalia, smuggled into sight much as Tyler Durden did the rogue phallus in Fight Club. Yet clear areas of interest emerge. Where The Act of Seeing..., made by an artist entering middle age, lingered over death and destruction, Dog Star Man concerns itself with creation and the natural world. (Are those fuzzy blobs spores or nipples?) Were you searching for apt music to run alongside or counteract the film's forceful soundlessness, most commercial recordings of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" and "The Firebird Suite" run almost exactly the same duration.

Amid the Brakhages' blitz of found and filmed footage, some evolutionary thinking gradually makes itself apparent. If the prelude is a rat-a-tat-tat barrage, at once stunning and somewhat discombobulating, later parts are composed in a more measured fashion, in line with the film's structuring narrative device: one bearded man's long, slow climb to the top of a mountain in wintry conditions. (With dog.) Patience is obviously required, but you can both see and feel the underlying vision deepening and maturing as the Brakhages press on with their project and approach the age of thirty: the initial attempt to look at everything in great haste, as a newborn would, is eventually replaced by an emphasis on the kind of imagery - some beautiful, some bloody, some plain bewildering - which sears itself onto the memory, that stays with us for the remainder of our days. That the film has endured - while passing out of the bowels of the Anthology Film Archives and into mainstream circulation via YouTube - is surely down to the fact it was left eternally open to interpretation and reinterpretation. At its most profound, Dog Star Man plays like a dazzling highlights reel for the cinema, and for life itself; at its most trivial, a ready lookbook for works to come. Terrence Malick built an entire career on it, and 95% of art-school graduates who directed music videos from the late 1980s onwards had to have seen it - rising to 97% for anyone working in the dance and shoegaze sectors.

Dog Star Man is now streaming via YouTube.