Scratched film opens a blockbuster
Kyle Cooper's twitching, hand-scratched opening titles for Se7en drew on the hand-worked film strips Brakhage spent his life making.
Brakhage scratched, painted and collaged directly onto film so that the surface itself became the image. Mothlight goes furthest: no camera, just organic matter taped to the strip.
When Kyle Cooper designed the opening of David Fincher's Se7en, he scratched lettering into the emulsion, double-exposed handwritten notebooks and let the frame jitter. The sequence is widely credited with reviving the title sequence in the 1990s, and the Brakhage connection is a regular part of its story.
Commonly cited in writing on the sequence