Filmmaker Stan Brakhage, a key figure in the American avant-garde, died March 9th at the age of 70. For nearly five decades, Brakhage restlessly explored expressive possibilities of film and the results were frequently like nothing else you'd ever seen except, possibly, other Brakhage films. The images can be fleeting glimpses of family or nature but just as likely unidentifiable blurs or blotches, especially when they are double or even triple superimpositions. Camera movement tends to be quick and jittery while the editing is peculiar if not unpredictable, giving little time for the contemplation of conventionally "poetic" views. Brakhage might deliberately scratch the emulsion for a wide variety of effects (sometimes even scratching his name into the film) or dab paint over it. And on top of all that, the majority of his films are silent.
One result is that while much of his work is immediately recognizable as his, there also may not be a typical Brakhage film. The 1963 Mothlight sandwiches moth wings and insect parts between two strips of clear film which was then printed and projected. The 1974 Text of Light is over an hour of glances at a room's contents through thick and distorting glass ash tray. The 1967 23rd Psalm Branch combined bits of a World War 2 film with scenes of rural Colorado. But Brakhage also relentlessly filmed his wife and five children in daily activities (eating, reading, sleeping) and some not so routine (childbirth most famously in the 1959 Window Water Baby Moving). The title to one 1962 film Avant-Garde Home Movie sums up that strain of Brakhage's work. Estimates of the number of films Brakhage made go from 340 to 400 and they run from a few seconds to several hours.
Brakhage was born January 14th, 1933 in Kansas City, Missouri. He grew up in Denver, later attending Dartmouth for a semester before heading to San Francisco's Institute of Fine Art where he hoped to study film. Brakhage became friends with some of that era's most probing poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and Louis Zukofsky. Their influence on his films is quite clear (and in fact a later book attempted to link Brakhage's work Charles Olson and the earlier generation of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein).
Brakhage's first films appeared in 1954, the same year he moved to New York City where he again moved in avant-garde circles, most famously helping pioneer assemblage artist Joseph Cornell create some of his films. During this time, Brakhage was working in a film production company, making commercials and industrial films. He married his wife Jane in 1957 and soon moved to Boulder, Colorado where he would live for over four decades, sometimes teaching at the University of Colorado. (Two of his students were Trey Parker and Matt Stone who supposedly named the character Stan in South Park in his honor; Brakhage made his only acting appearance in their film Cannibal: The Musical). He married his second wife Marilyn in 1989 and moved to Canada in 2002 where he finally succumbed to a long illness.
Brakhage tended to present himself as being in the Romantic tradition of the artist, shunning commerce and the masses while pursuing a unique vision. To some degree that's certainly true but Brakhage can also be viewed as an outsider artist, impulsively and seemingly uncontrollably emitting a flood of idiosyncratic, mystifying films that are at times beautiful and moving but just as frequently ridiculous or boring. This comes through even more clearly in his generally overblown writings, which can range from the grandiose and mystical to petty (a passage in The Brakhage Scrapbook rants unreasonably about a local school adminstrator). He developed a theory of "closed-eye vision" that is more a provocative comment than the foundation for lengthy explication, or least a tedious Brakhage explication. Still, we shouldn't expect artists to be coherent or even necessarily smart when commenting on their work. Perhaps Brakhage's aesthetic might be best summed up by the 1971 title The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (a literal translation of the Latin word "autopsia," appropriate considering that an autopsy is the subject of the film).
Brakhage's films resist translation to video more than others since celluloid, light and a screen aren't just a conduit for a story but the essential elements of his art. There have been sporadic releases that Brakhage apparently approved somewhat reluctantly but the big news is a forthcoming two-DVD set due from Criterion in May, where Brakhage collaborated and even personally approved the transfers. Titled By Brakhage it will contain many of his best-known films including Mothlight, Desistfilm, Dog Star Man, The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes and The Garden of Earthly Delights. This clearly will be a reduction of his work just as a textbook's reproduction of a Jackson Pollock or Van Gogh painting only hints at the power and majesty of the actual work. Nevertheless, these DVDs are the only way most people will be able to experience a true American original and should be applauded for that.
by Lang Thompson
