James Stanley Brakhage
(January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003), better known as Stan
Brakhage, was an American
non-narrative filmmaker who is considered
to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film.
Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a
large and diverse body of work,
exploring a variety of formats, approaches and
techniques that included
handheld camerawork,
painting directly onto celluloid,
fast cutting,
in-camera editing, scratching on film and
the use of
multiple exposures.
Interested in
mythology and inspired by
music, poetry and visual phenomena, Brakhage sought to reveal the
universal in the particular, exploring themes of birth, mortality,
sexuality and innocence.
Brakhage's films are often noted for their expressiveness and
lyricism.
Biography
Born
Robert Sanders in Kansas City, Missouri
on January 14, 1933, Brakhage was adopted and
renamed three weeks after his birth by Ludwig and Clara
Brakhage.
As a child, Brakhage was featured on
radio as
a boy
soprano and sang in church choirs and
as a soloist at other events.
He was raised in Denver, Colorado
, where he attended high school with the filmmaker
Larry Jordan and the musicians Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. Together, Brakhage,
Jordan, Tenney and Subtonick formed a drama group called the
Gadflies.
Brakhage
briefly attended Dartmouth College
on a scholarship before dropping out to pursue
filmmaking. He completed his first film,
Interim, at the age of 19; the music for
the film was composed by his school friend James Tenney.
In 1953,
Brakhage moved to San
Francisco
to attend
the San Francisco
School of the Arts, then called the California School of the
Arts. He found the atmosphere in San Francisco more
rewarding, associating with poets Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, but did not complete his
education, instead moving to New York City
in 1954. There he met a number of notable
artists, including
Maya Deren (in whose
apartment he briefly lived),
Willard
Maas,
Jonas Mekas,
Marie Menken,
Joseph
Cornell, and
John Cage. Brakhage would
collaborate with the latter two, making two films with Cornell
(
Gnir Rednow and
Centuries of June) and using Cage's
music for the soundtrack of his first
color
film,
In
Between.
Brakhage spent the next few years living in near poverty, depressed
about what he saw as the failure of his work. He briefly considered
suicide. While living in Denver, Brakhage met Mary Jane Collom,
whom he married in late 1957. Known as Jane Brakhage, she became
his first wife. Brakhage tried to make money on his films, but had
to take a job making
industrial
shorts to support his family. In 1959, Jane gave birth to the
first of the five children they would have together, an event
Brakhage recorded for his 1959 film
Window Water Baby
Moving.
The 1960s and Beginning of Recognition
When Brakhage's early films had been exhibited in the 1950s, they
had often been met with derision, but in the early 1960s Brakhage
began to receive recognition in exhibitions and film publications,
including
Film Culture, which awarded several of his
films, including
The
Dead, in 1962. The award statement, written by
Jonas Mekas, a critic who would later become an
influential experimental filmmaker in his own right, cited Brakhage
for bringing to cinema "an intelligence and subtlety that is
usually the province of the older arts."
From 1961 to 1964, Brakhage worked on a series of 5 films known as
the
Dog Star Man cycle.
The
Brakhages moved to Lump Gulch, Colorado
in 1964,
though Brakhage continued to make regular visits to New
York. During one of those visits, the
16mm film equipment he had been using was stolen.
Brakhage couldn't afford to replace it, instead opting to buy
cheaper
8mm film equipment. He soon began
working in the format, producing a 30-part cycle of 8mm films known
as the
Songs
from 1964 to 1969. The
Songs include one of Brakhage's
most acclaimed films,
23rd Psalm
Branch, a response to the Vietnam War and its presentation
in the mass media.
Brakhage
began teaching film history and aesthetics at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago
in 1969, commuting from his home in Colorado.
1970s and 1980s
Brakhage explored further approaches to filmmaking in the 1970s.
In 1971,
he completed a set of three films inspired by public institutions
in the city of Pittsburgh
. These three films--
Eyes, about the
city police,
Deus Ex, filmed in a hospital, and
The Act of
Seeing with One's Own Eyes, depicting autopsy--are
collectively known as "The Pittsburgh Trilogy." In 1974, Brakhage
made the feature-length
Text of
Light, consisting entirely of images of light refracted in
a glass
ashtray. In 1979, he experimented
with
Polavision, a format marketed by
Polaroid, making about five 2 1/2 minute
films. The whereabouts of these films are now unknown. He continued
his visual explorations of landscape and the nature of light and
thought process, and through the late 70's and early 80's produced
filmic equivalents of what he termed "moving visual thinking" in
several series of photographic abstractions known as the Roman,
Arabic, and Egyptian series.
In 1979,
Brakhage began teaching at the University
of Colorado
in Boulder. In 1986, Brakhage separated from
Jane, and in 1989 he married his second wife, Marilyn. The two
would have two children together. In the late 1980s, Brakhage
returned to making
sound films, with the
four-part
Faustfilm cycle, and
also completed the hand-painted "Dante Quartet."
1990s - 2000s and death
Brakhage remained extremely productive through the last two decades
of his life, sometimes working in collaboration with other
filmmakers, including his University of Colorado colleague
Phil Solomon. Several more sound films were
completed, including "Passage Through: A Ritual," edited to the
music of Philip Corner, and "Christ Mass Sex Dance" and "Ellipsis
No. 5," both with music by James Tenney. He also produced the major
meditations on childhood, adolescence, aging and mortality
collectively known as the "Vancouver Island Quartet," as well as
numerous hand-painted works.
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. The last footage Brakhage shot has been made available under
the title
Work in
Progress. At the time of his death, Brakhage was also
working the
Chinese Series,
made by scratching directly on to film.
Though not a practicing
Christian during
his adulthood, Brakhage requested a traditional
Anglican service. The funeral was attended largely
by family members, as well as a few friends from the filmmaking
world, and included a performance of
J.S.
Bach's
Toccata and Fugue in D
Minor.
Influence
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
compared to Brakhage's abstract films. The opening track of
Stereolab's album
Dots and Loops, "Brakhage", is also
named after him.
The films of Stan Brakhage are distributed in their original format
by
Canyon Cinema[28601] in San
Francisco.
Filmography
The Brakhage films, comprising his edited originals, intermediate
elements, and other original material, are housed at the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive, where a long-term
project is underway to preserve and restore his entire film
output.
Writings
Brakhage wrote a number of books about films, 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).
References
- Chicago Reader: The Act of Seeing with One's Own
Eyes
- Senses of Cinema: Stan Brakhage
- Senses of Cinema: Stan Brakhage
- Before the Beginning Was the Word: Stan Brakhage's by Paul
Arthut
- Senses of Cinema: Stan Brakhage
- Senses of Cinema: Stan Brakhage
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- James, David E. Stan Brakhage : Filmmaker. New York:
Temple UP, 2005.
- Account of Stan Brakhage's Funeral by Phil
Solomon
- Interview with Stan mentions Parker and Stone as
students
- Review of Harmon's film reference to
Brakhage
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