Stan Brakhage, 70, filmmaker who redefined the avant-garde

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A fine obit! Be sure not to miss, towards the end, the story of how he died.
clark
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Stan Brakhage, 70, filmmaker who redefined the avant-garde
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff, 3/12/2003
Stan Brakhage, a towering figure in avant-garde filmmaking who created more than 350 elliptical and poetic works of cinema, died Sunday of cancer in Victoria, British Columbia. He was 70.

In a country and a culture dominated by narrative Hollywood fare, Mr. Brakhage and his ''untutored eye'' single-handedly exploded notions of what non-narrative film could do: He was to cinema what Jackson Pollock was to painting and John Cage (with whom Mr. Brakhage studied) was to music. Starting in the 1950s, his work explored man's relation to the visual world in both severely abstract shorts and longer, dreamlike epics such as the ''Dog Star Man'' series (1961-64), which has since been selected for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.
''He's the single most important practitioner of experimental cinema in the entire history of filmmaking,'' said Bruce Jenkins, curator of the Harvard Film Archive. ''It's not just that he came along in the 1950s and revolutionized the content and approach of what most people consider experimental film. He did it in such a substantial way that he transcends his time. There is no rival figure.''
Mainstream cinema absorbed some of Mr. Brakhage's achievements. The much-imitated opening credits of the 1995 thriller ''Seven'' refashioned his scratch technique to unnerving ends, and the makers of ''Superman'' (1978) studied Mr. Brakhage's 1974 film ''The Text of Life'' when creating the superhero's crystal healing chamber.
His rapid cutting, unmoored camerawork, and dislocating focal shifts echo through everything from advertisements to the more adventurously shot feature films. By and large, though, Hollywood and Mr. Brakhage had little use for each other, and the filmmaker is much better known among European cinephiles than among even knowledgeable American filmgoers.
Mr. Brakhage enjoyed mainstream movies nevertheless, and disliked using the word ''abstract'' to decribe his work. In an April 2001 interview, he said that he preferred the term ''poetic film,'' adding, ''Hollywood films are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.''
Mr. Brakhage was born in Kansas City, Mo., and was raised in Colorado, where he had a career as a boy soprano. An early interest in music, art, and film resulted in his attending Dartmouth College on a Robert Frost scholarship, but he didn't fit in with the school's rugged party atmosphere and left after suffering a nervous breakdown.
He resurfaced at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and, in the late 1950s, settled in Colorado, where he made films and taught filmmaking for much of the rest of his life.
Initially, Mr. Brakhage looked for inspiration to the Surrealist movies of post-World War II experimental directors like Maya Deren, but he soon moved beyond the need for even the haziest of narratives. ''I grew very quickly as a film artist once I got rid of drama as a prime source of inspiration,'' he later said. He also saw fit to dispense with music -- most of his films are silent -- and found even titles a distraction: one of his later works is called, simply, ''. . .''
Said the HFA's Jenkins, ''Brakhage took the European mode of personal filmmaking and completely turned it inside out -- he moved from exploring the pain of consciousness to exploring consciousness itself.''
Mr. Brakhage himself may have described his ecstatic aesthetic best in ''Metaphors on Vision,'' one of his many books. ''Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color,'' he wrote in the introduction. ''Imagine a world before the `beginning was the word.' ''
Key works in that path of discovery included ''Anticipation of the Night'' (1958); ''Window, Water, Baby, Moving'' (1959) -- an ode to the birth of his first child that the film development lab almost destroyed as pornographic; the five films in the ''Dog Star Man'' series; and ''Mothlight'' (1963). The last film, in which Mr. Brakhage glued mothwings, leaves, and other natural detritus directly onto the film-strip, prefigures later work in which he painted splotches and images onto celluloid frame by frame.
Those late-career movies are phantasmagoric detonations of light that come closest to the direct, unmediated perception that Mr. Brakhage was after, but they had their cost: The Chinese coal-tar paint that the director favored turned out to be carcinogenic and led both to the bladder cancer he beat in the early 1990s and, ultimately, to his death.
Mr. Brakhage taught for 12 years at the Art Institute of Chicago and for two decades at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where his students included Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of ''South Park.'' He appears in their first film, ''Cannibal: The Musical'' and professed to be a great fan of the ''South Park'' movie.
Before his death, the director sent his negatives for preservation to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which had hosted three retrospectives of his work over the years. In addition, the University of Colorado Library has purchased new prints of all of his approximately 380 works.
Mr. Brakhage was married twice, and leaves his second wife, Marilyn, and seven children. A two-disc DVD collection of 26 films will be released by Criterion in May.
This story ran on page D10 of the Boston Globe on 3/12/2003.

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Topic - Stan Brakhage, 70, filmmaker who redefined the avant-garde - clarkjohnsen 08:16:01 03/12/03 (1)

Stan Brakhage was my guide to a brave new world. (A Tribute)) - Harmonia 16:07:18 03/13/03 (0)

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