Stan Brakhage

The art and legacy of a towering figure in the independent film movement.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Since the late 1950s Stan Brakhage has been in the forefront of independent filmmaking. His body of work — some seventy hours — is one of the largest of any filmmaker in the history of cinema, and one of the most diverse. Probably the most widely quoted experimental filmmaker in history, his films typify the independent cinema. Until now, despite well-deserved acclaim, there has been no comprehensive study of Brakhage’s oeuvre. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition fills this void. R. Bruce Elder delineates the aesthetic parallels between Brakhage’s films and a broad spectrum of American art from the 1920s through the 1960s. This book is certain to stir the passions of those interested in artistic critique and interpretation in its broadest terms.

This book shows how a masterpiece of experimental cinema can be interpreted through hermeneutics of the film world. As an application of Ricœurian methodology to a non-narrative film, the book calls into question the fundamental concept of the film world. Firmly rooted within the context of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man was not created on the basis of a narrative structure and representation of characters, places and events, but on very different presuppositions. The techniques with which Brakhage worked on celluloid and used frames as canvases, as well as his choice to make the film without dialogue and sound, exhort the interpreter to directly question the philosophical language of moving images.

Stan Brakhage's body of work counts as one of the most important within post-war avant-garde cinema, and yet it has rarely been given the attention it deserves. Over the years, though, diverse and original reflections have developed, distancing his figure little by little from critical categories. This collection of newly commissioned essays, plus some important reprinted work, queries some of the consensus on Brakhage's films. In particular, many of these essays revolve around the controversial issues of representation and perception. This project sets out from the assumption that Brakhage's art is articulated primarily through opposing tensions, which donate his figure and films an extraordinary depth, even as they evince fleetingness, elusivity and paradoxicality. This collection aims not only to clarify aspects of Brakhage's art, but also to show how his work is involved in a constant mediation between antinomies and opposites. At the same time, his art presents a multifaceted object endlessly posing new questions to the viewer, for which no point of entry or perspective is preferred in respect to the others. Acknowledging this, this volume hopes that the experience of his films will be revitalised. Featuring topics as diverse as the technical and semantic ambiguity of blacks, the fissures in mimetic representation of the 'it' within the 'itself' of an image, the film-maker as practical psychologist through cognitive theories, the critique of ocularcentrism by mingling sight with other senses such as touch, films that can actually philosophise in a Wittgensteinian way, political guilt and collusion in aesthetic forms, a disjunctive, reflexive, and phenomenological temporality realising Deleuze's image-time, and the echoes of Ezra Pound and pneumophantasmology in the quest of art as spiritual revelation; this book addresses not only scholars, but also is a thorough and thought-provoking introduction for the uninitiated. Contributors include: Nicky Hamlyn, Peter Mudie, Paul Taberham, Gareth Evans, Rebecca A. Sheehan, Christina Chalmers, Stephen Mooney and Marco Lori.

In the course of making nearly 400 films over the past 50 years, "Stan Brakhage" became synonymous with independent American filmmaking, particularly its avant-garde component. This major collection of writings draws primarily upon two long out-of-print books--Metaphors on Vision and Brakhage Scrapbook. Brakhage examines filmmaking in relation to social and professional contexts, the nature of influence and collaboration, the aesthetics of personal experience, and the conditions under which various films were made. Brakhage discusses his predecessors and contemporaries, relates film to dance and poetry, and in "A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book" provides a manual for the novice filmmaker. Lectures, interviews, essays, and manifestos document Brakhage's personal vision and public persona.

In this volume, editor Suranjan Ganguly collects eight of Stan Brakhage's most important interviews in which the filmmaker describes his conceptual frameworks; his theories of vision and sound; the importance of poetry, music, and the visual arts in relation to his work; his concept of the muse; and the key influences on his art-making. In doing so, Brakhage (1933-2003) discusses some of his iconic films, such as Anticipation of the Night, Dog Star Man, Scenes from Under Childhood, Mothlight, and Text of Light. One of the most innovative filmmakers in the history of experimental cinema, Brakhage made almost 350 films in his fifty-two-year-long career. These films include psychodramas, autobiography, Freudian trance films, birth films, song cycles, meditations on light, and hand-painted films, some of which range from nine seconds to over four hours in duration. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he lived most of his life in the mountains of Colorado, teaching for twenty-one years in the film studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As a filmmaker, Brakhage's life-long obsession with what he called an "adventure in perception" made him focus on the act of seeing itself, which he tried to capture on film in multiple ways both with and without his camera and by scratching and painting on film. Convinced that there is a primary level of cognition that precedes language, he wrote of the "untutored eye" with which children can access ineffable visual realities. Adults, who have lost such primal sight, can "retrain" their eyes by becoming conscious of what constitutes true vision and the different ways in which they daily perceive the world. Brakhage's films experiment with such perceptions, manipulating visual and auditory experience in ways that continue to influence film today.