In 1959, Stan Brakhage recorded the birth of his daughter in Window Water Baby Moving; at the close of Tortured Dust, his latest film, which was some 3-1/2 years in the making, he celebrates the birth of his first grandchild. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman writes, “Tortured Dust brings to a close the monumental work (The Book of the Film) Stan Brakhage began 17 years ago.... That Tortured Dust is beautiful goes without saying. Brakhage observes his family in Jan Steen groupings or focuses on individuals in hazy cameos. Alternately faded and pastel or darkly chiaroscuro, his images are characterized by a pervasive sense of distance. Although the Brakhage family had surely long since learned to ignore their resident Boswell as he filmed them, one is haunted by the studied impassivity on their faces. To a certain degree Tortured Dust seems to be about father as outsider. Everything is mediated by windows, mirrors or frames within frames....
“Tortured Dust is dedicated to Marguerite Young--an artist with whom Brakhage might well identify. (She is, he has said, the only living writer ‘who seeks to extend the realm' of James Joyce, a statement that applies to his own stream-of-consciousness methodology as well.) The film takes its title from Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling: ‘Why should she give birth, though she had worked in a pottery, to an urn, to a stone angel, to the face of a cracked sundial? Why should she be, she screamed, this tortured dust?'”