Stan Brakhage; Independent Uk obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Prolific experimental film-maker
15 March 2003
In a prolific career spanning more than 50 years, Stan Brakhage produced an
enormous body of work (around 400 films) of deep passion and daunting
innovation in technique, form and content. He was a founding figure of
avant-garde film as a medium of personal expression alongside the other fine
arts.
Imposing physically, he loomed large for both his supporters in experimental
film and his critics. His films have to be placed up with the work of major
figures like Jackson Pollock, John Cage and Andy Warhol in their artistic
achievement in the extraordinary flowering of visual arts in America since
the Second World War.
Born Robert Sanders in 1933 in Kansas City, he was adopted and came to be
known as Stan Brakhage. He attended Dartmouth College in 1951 but, unhappy,
left after a semester. The following year, he made his first film, Interim.
He then attended the Institute of Fine Art in San Francisco. The West Coast
had been a hotbed of avant-garde film activity in the immediate post-war
years. Key figures were Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, James Broughton, Gregory
Markopoulos and Sidney Peterson, with whom he hoped to study at the
institute. The film course had ceased so he joined a theatre company in
Denver before returning to San Francisco, where he befriended the modernist
poets Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Michael McClure and,
especially, Robert Duncan, and the painter Jess Collins.
Acquiring 16mm equipment, he made Desistfilm (1954), the first of a series
of films (including The Way to Shadow Garden, 1955, Reflections on Black,
1955, and Flesh of Morning, 1956) in which he tried to find his own film
voice in the "trance" psychodrama style of Deren's classic Meshes of the
Afternoon (1943) and Anger's gay classic Fireworks (1947).
In 1954 he moved to New York, where he met, among others, Deren, Jonas
Mekas, Marie Menken (who influenced his style), Cage and Varèse. In 1955 the
Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell commissioned him to shoot a film, Wonder
Ring. From this period until the early Sixties, Brakhage also eked a living
with commercial film work including television advertisements and industrial
films.
In 1957 he married Jane Collom, who was a powerful presence in his work.
They settled in the Colorado mountains near Boulder. Working in relative
isolation (Anger had moved to Paris and Deren produced little), Brakhage
forged an intensely personal, free-flowing, hand-held camera aesthetic which
reflected American poetry and the paintings of the abstract expressionists.
He almost single-handedly redefined an avant-garde cinema in which form and
content became inseparable and narrative drama was ousted by a lyrical
poetics.
He was the film artisan par excellence, editing at times on his kitchen
table, relishing the tactile quality of handling film. Brakhage was the
first to explore fully the physical qualities of film - scratching, burning
and staining the film strip; pushing images out of focus; blurring them with
fast swivel pans, spitting on the lens for "impressionist" ends. He placed
himself firmly in the romantic poetic visionary tradition. The camera was
transformed from being a mere recording device to having the expressivity of
a paintbrush. Implicit in this approach was an emphasis on process. He had
already made the decision to exclude sound from his films even though music
was ever an inspiration.
A brooding darkness, owing as much to his own personality as it did to a
pessimistic Romanticism, pervades his work particularly in the Fifties and
early Sixties. In Anticipation of the Night (1958), which heralded his
hard-won breakthrough into lyricism, his own real threatened suicide haunts
the film. The lyricism that dominated the Fifties took a more ambitious
mythic turn culminating in what is seen by many as his masterpiece, Dog Star
Man (1964), which describes with a primal, sometimes manic, energy the
journey of self-discovery through an encounter with nature. It was reworked
into The Art of Vision (1965), seen by some as his finest achievement.
Throughout the output was astonishing. The overall quality is awesome, fired
by a incessant experimentalism and willingness to use his own life, family
and environs as subject-matter. In this spirit he made one of his most
popular films, Window Water Baby Moving (1959), a film of the birth of his
first child which was branded pornographic at the time. Over a decade later
a stay in hospital produced a film on the autopsy rooms, the brilliant, if
daunting, The Act of Seeing with One's Eyes (1971). In 1963 he made another
favourite, Mothlight, in which he glued leaves, moths and fragments from
nature on to the film strip.
The theft of his 16mm equipment in 1964 enforced five years of exquisite
films made on the "amateur" 8mm gauge. During the same time Warholian
minimalism held sway in New York and eventually in Europe, leading to a
distaste in some quarters for what was seen as his conservatism. In the
Eighties he felt critically neglected and his family life came under strain,
ending with his divorce in 1987. But with the collapse of formalism and the
rise of a younger generation of film-makers, especially American women
film-makers such as Abigail Child and Marjorie Keller, Brakhage's films once
more became pertinent for their artistic expression of the "personal".
Brakhage taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Colorado
(his students included the creators of South Park). He loved film, his
tastes encompassing Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Lang and Tarkovsky. The
feature film was the novel to his own poetry. He was deeply generous to his
fellow film-makers, writing about their work, supporting films that often
ran counter to his own sensibility. His books on film included Metaphors on
Vision (1962), which set out his own aesthetic.
In the last decade of his life his output remained unnervingly high and
explorative, turning to painting on film (35mm and Imax) for some beautiful
abstract films, and in the Faust series of the late Eighties returning
refreshed to the psychodrama.
Michael O'Pray
Robert Sanders (James Stanley Brakhage), film-maker: born Kansas City,
Missouri 14 January 1933; married 1957 Jane Collom (two sons, three
daughters; marriage dissolved 1987), 1989 Marilyn Jull (two sons); died
Victoria, British Columbia 9 March 2003.