Stan Brakhage: A short introduction.

James Stanley Brakhage (1933-2003), was an American avant-garde, experimental filmmaker, who in a career spanning half a century and roughly 500 short and lengthy films, established himself as one of the greatest figures in experimental film.

The basic facts of his life are well known…or there is always Google for that!

Born: January 14, 1933.

Parents: Clara and Ludwig Brakhage. He was adopted, and renamed James Stanely Brakhage.

Education: Attended Dartmouth, dropped out to pursue films, went to San Fransisco, attended San Fransisco School of Arts, did not finish college, and then moved to New York City in 1954.

Thereafter, began the creative outflow of his genius.

At first, much like any other great artist (*sigh*), he lived in utter poverty for a while, even considered suicide, met Mary Jane Collom, got married to the same in 1957, had 5 kids, continued to make make films which consistently managed to avoid success…and then came the ‘swingin’ sixties’!

In 1962, film publication Film Culture awarded some of his films, including ‘The Dead’. From 1961 to 1964, Brakhage worked on a series of 5 films known as the Dog Star Man Cycle.

In 1981, Brakhage began teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder. During the decade, Brakhage separated from Jane and married his second wife, Marilyn, with whom he’d previously been having an affair, and had two children with her.

In the second half of the 1980s, Brakhage returned to making sound films. The result was the creation of his most ambitious sound work, the four-part Faustfilm cycle.

He transformed the projected image to an expression of an individual’s emotions, ideas, dreams, fantasies, visions, eye-music, closed-eye seeing, and nightmares, and yet managed to retain the documentary essence: a sort of reality as Brakhage personally perceived it. He used a hand held camera, and implemented techniques including out of focus and over and under exposure, rapid editing, painting directly on the film strip, and also anamorphic distortion, collaging objects directly onto celluloid, and heating raw stock before exposure.

Brian Frye writes:

If Maya Deren invented the American avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage realized its potential. Unquestionably the most important (then living) avant-garde filmmaker, Brakhage single-handedly transformed the schism separating the avant-garde from classical filmmaking into a chasm. And the ultimate consequences have yet to be resolved; his films appear nearly as radical today as the day he made them.

Personally, his work was subtle at the best of times: quite intertwined and intricate in the composition, color, texture, and rhythm. The results were invariably such that they always demanded at least a second viewing…and the result of the second viewing was such that it demanded a third..and so on.

Brakhage’s great subject was light itself, its infinite varieties seen as manifestations of unbounded and unrestricted energy and its concretization into objects representing the trapping of that energy, and his great desire was to make cinema equal to the other arts by using that which was uniquely cinematic — by organizing light in the time and space of the projected image — in a way that would be worthy, structurally and aesthetically, of the poetry, painting, and music that most inspired him.

Here is one of his most celebrated short films, called ‘Cat’s Cradle’.

In the above video, you can see what the two writers were talking about.

Another example is the the feature-length The Text of Light (1974), which consists entirely of abstracted patterns of light photographed through a thick, deep-green ashtray, reducing the art of photography to its ratio ultima, the influence of light on photographic emulsion. Brackhage himself writes:

…in photographing this ashtray for instance, I’m sitting for hours to get 30 seconds of film. I’m sitting watching what’s happening and clicking a frame, and sitting and watching, and further than that, I had shot several hundred feet and they seemed dead. They didn’t reflect at all my excitement and emotion and feeling. They had no anima in them, except for two or three shots where the lens which was on a tripod, pressed against the desk, had jerked. Those were just random, but what gave me the clue. What I began doing was always holding the camera in hand. For hours. Clicking. Waiting. Seeing what the sun did to the scene. As I saw what was happening in the frame to these little particles of light, changing, I would shoot the camera very slightly.

However, in later years, Brackhage would focus largely on painting, scratching and drawing directly on the surface of the film strip itself, focusing more on the bare act of perception, than on the technique of photography.

Stan Brakhage died of cancer on March 8, 2003, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.