6 Perceiving War’s Horizon in Stan Brakhage’s 23 rd Psalm Branch Christina Chalmers In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch 1 ‘ I can’t go on!’ – to begin in medias res with Stan Brakhage’s spliced interjection to the ‘war film’ 23 rd Psalm Branch (1966–67), scratched onto black leader, is to begin with a pivotal moment in his consideration of his own aesthetic. 2 Brakhage later explained the significance of this invasion of filmic space by an authorial voice: ‘I found that just as in the world at large, when man as a society screams: “We can’t go on. We must have peace”, that’s when the war is really beginning to take hold’. 3 In 23 rd Psalm Branch, war’s ubiquitous death fugue intensifies but never subsides. The thematisation of political guilt throughout the film is double; Brakhage sees himself as collusive with ‘thought patterns’ struc- turing war; and he also sees himself as failing to fight against destructive forces within the film’s ‘war’ itself. ‘Thought patterns are – as endless as … precise as eye’s hell is’. 4 I will investigate this problematic through thinking about collusion and realism as relations to documentary material and formalist strategies: thinking through Adorno’s assertion in Aesthetic Theory that: ‘Art struggles against … collusion by excluding through its language of form that remainder of affirmation maintained by social realism: This is the social element in radical formalism’. 5 Anxiety about formal propriety dramatised within the film indexes the threat of collusion: does the application of Brakhage’s radically ‘innovative’ style efface or 111