Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage (January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American non-narrative filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the most important experimental filmmakers of the 20th century. He worked with various kinds of film: 16mm, 8mm, 35mm, and IMAX, and was a practitioner of what he referred to as "pure cinema".

Biography

Brakhage was born as Robert Sanders in an orphanage in Kansas City, Missouri. Three weeks after his birth, he was adopted by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage and given the name James Stanley Brakhage.

As a child, he was featured on radio as a boy soprano before going to high school in Denver, Colorado and then dropping out of Dartmouth College after several months to make films. He was influenced by the writings of Sergei Eisenstein and the films of Jean Cocteau as well as the Italian neorealism movement. His first film, "Interim" (1952), was in the neo-realist style and had music by James Tenney.

In 1953, Brakhage moved to San Francisco where he associated with poets such as Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth. In late 1954, he moved to New York City where he met a number of contemporary artists, including Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Joseph Cornell, and John Cage.

Brakhage's films are usually silent and lack a story, being more analogous to visual poetry than to prose story-telling. He often referred to them as "visual music" or "moving visual thinking." His films range in length from just a few seconds to several hours, but most last between two or three minutes and one hour. He frequently hand-painted the film or scratched the image directly into the film emulsion, and sometimes used collage techniques. For [http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageS.html#Mothlight "Mothlight"] (1963), for example, he taped moth wings, twigs, and leaves onto clear film and made prints from it. In the 1960s and 1970s especially, his life with his first wife Jane and their five children was frequently shown, though in a fragmented and interior way rather than as documentation.

Brakhage's work covers a variety of subjects and techniques. "Window Water Baby Moving" (1959) is a record of the birth of his first child, while "23rd Psalm Branch" (1966-67) is a meditation on war that intercuts footage of Colorado, where he lived, with shots of World War II. "Dog Star Man" (1961-64), perhaps his most famous work, features a man climbing a mountain, shots of stellar objects and more footage of his wife giving birth. It is usually read as addressing the unity of creation. The same footage was also made into a much longer film, [http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Brakhage7.html The Art of Vision] . Works from his later periods include the four-part "Faust Series" (1987-89), the four-part "Visions in Meditation" (1989-90), "Passage Through: A Ritual" (1991), and "The Vancouver Island Quartet" (1991-2002). One of his last works was the thirty minute hand-painted film, [http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Brakhage3.html#Panels "Panels For the Walls of Heaven"] , the last of the four Vancouver Island films. He also completed several more collaborations with musicians, including two more works with music by James Tenney, "Christ Mass Sex Dance" (1991), and "Ellipses #5" (1998).

Brakhage wrote a number of books, including "Metaphors on Vision" (1963), "A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book" (1971), and the posthumously published "Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker" (2003). He often gave lectures at universities, museums, galleries, film festivals and so on. From 1969 he taught film history and aesthetics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and from 1981 taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He taught because, despite being the best known American avant-garde filmmaker, he could not make a living from his work.

Brakhage was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1996, and his bladder was removed. The surgery seemed successful, but the cancer eventually returned. He retired from teaching and moved to Canada in 2002, settling with his second wife Marilyn and their two sons in Victoria, British Columbia. Brakhage died there on March 9, 2003, aged 70, having made almost four hundred films in all. He believed, and his doctors confirmed, that the coal-tar dyes he used to paint his films prior to 1996 had caused his cancer.Fact|date=August 2007

Brakhage is revered as one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century, and his work has had some small impact on mainstream cinema. The credits of the film "Seven", with their scratched emulsion, rapid cutaways and bursts of light are in Brakhage's style. The concluding credits to "The Jacket" are an homage, the background imitating his "Mothlight."

Among Brakhage's students were Eric Darnell, the director of Antz, as well as the creators of "South Park", Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and he is featured in their student film "Cannibal! The Musical". The work of contemporary film and video artist Raymond Salvatore Harmon is often [http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=25621 compared] to Brakhage's abstract films. The opening track of Stereolab's album "Dots and Loops", "Brakhage", is also named after him.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive is currently working on the restoration of Stan Brakhage's complete film output.

The films of Stan Brakhage are distributed in their original format by Canyon Cinema [http://www.canyoncinema.com] in San Francisco.

DVD anthology: "By Brakhage"

"By Brakhage" is the title of a DVD anthology released by the Criterion Collection in 2003. The set contains the 79 minute "Dog Star Man" plus a selection of shorter works from throughout his 50 years of filmmaking, including several of the late hand-painted pieces.

* Desistfilm (1954)
* The Wonder Ring (1955)
* Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959)
* Window Water Baby Moving (1959)
* Mothlight (1963)
* Cat's Cradle (1958)
* Dog Star Man (1964)
* Eye Myth (1967)
* The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971)
* The Wold Shadow (1972)
* The Stars Are Beautiful (1974)
* The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981)
* Night Music (1986)
* The Dante Quartet (1987)
* Kindering (1987)
* I...Dreaming (1988)
* Rage Net (1988)
* Glaze of Cathexis (1990)
* Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991)
* Crack Glass Eulogy (1992)
* For Marilyn (1992)
* Stellar (1993)
* Study in Color and Black and White (1993)
* Black Ice (1994)
* Comingled Containers (1996)
* The Dark Tower (1999)
* Lovesong (2001)

External links

* [http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/Filmography.html Filmography] by Fred Camper.
* [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0104132/ IMDB Filmography]
* [http://www.logosjournal.com/camper.htm On Stan Brakhage]
* [http://www.logosjournal.com/brakhage_mekas.htm A Conversation Between Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage]
* [http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/avantbib.html#brakhage Stan Brakhage bibliography (via UC Berkeley)]
* [http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageL.html Directory of links to pages about Brakhage]
* [http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2007/10/1025-portrait-of-jason-brakhage-shorts.html#i2 Reviews of several Brakhage shorts by Ed Howard at Only The Cinema]
* [http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2007/10/1028-arabic-series-11-19-ox-bow.html Review of Brakhage's "Arabic Series" by Ed Howard at Only The Cinema]
* [http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2007/11/1111-crimes-and-misdemeanors-pittsburgh.html#i2 Review of Brakhage's "Text of Light" and "Pittsburgh Trilogy" at Only The Cinema]
* [http://www.canyoncinema.com/B/Brakhage.html Descriptions of each of Brakhage's films]
* [http://www.canyoncinema.com Rental of Brakhage's films in 16mm and other formats]
* [http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/brakhage.html Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database]
* [http://www.theyshootpictures.com/brakhagestan.htm They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
* [http://www.colorado.edu/ATLAS/millennium/brakhage.html Description of Brakhage's work] .
* [http://brooklynrail.org/2006/07/film/magic-and-images Magic & Images/ Images & Magic] , by David Levi-Strauss — an opening paper for a conference at Princeton University, "Magic and the American Avant-Garde Cinema", March 11, 2006.