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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.
Follow Ups:
I thought he had beaten the cancer. Ahhhhhhh...this is sad news.Back in the 70's, I took Stan Brakhage's film history course for four semesters at the Art Institue of Chicago. Whatever one thinks of his films, Brakhage was a wonderful, inspiring teacher, whose classes were very popular and frequently audited by students from UofC and other universities. Brakhage required no term papers in these courses. He demanded only that students attend each class and stay for the entire lecture. (Which, of course, always included one or more films.) Show up and pay attention. That was it. In return, Brakhage tried to expand our perception and fan whatever sparks of creativity lay within.
I find it quite astonishing now that one of America's great filmmakers would fly into Chicago every week for 12 years to teach a *single* class. (In hindsight, I suppose Brakhage needed the money.) Yet there he would be, apparently eager and ready, if not rested, to face us each Monday morning. He showed every imaginable type of film his courses, from Charlie Chaplin to Kenneth Anger, and spoke easily and eloquently about them all. The Art Institute film library was vast, but occassionally, Brakhage would arrive with reels of something unusual for us to explore, either from his personal library or from another artist's collection. It was a film junkie's dream.
"Don't hide at the back of the auditorium" he'd chide us. "Come down and sit closer to the front, become involved in what you're seeing. Let the screen fill your field of vision!"
Brakhage urged us to think about film *as* "film": pieces of celluloid, which, when projected in front of a beam of light, produce texture and shadow...a medium whose surface could be directly manipulated...painted or drawn upon, marked, scratched, redefined. He opened our minds to expressive possiblities outside narrative: he revealed film as a portal into a state of mind or being. (An idea, in the early to mid seventies, that many of us were, ahem, eager to embrace.)
I remember well Brakhage talking about conventional, narrative films being like novels, whereas his own films were like poems. (An apt analogy.) We students saw a few of Brakhage's films in each semester, although he was rather reticent about tooting his own horn. I don't think he regarded his own work as specifically "avante garde" or something "outside" the canon, but simply as a very personal exploration and expression of his inner voice. He disliked anyone refering to his films as "abstract". They were very specifically "about" something to him. Non narratives yes, abstractions, no. Interestingly, George Balanchine, another personal hero of mine, said much the same of his ballets: he preferred to call them "plotless", and he bristled at the term "abstract" when used to describe to his dances.
Brakhage's films resided then (as now) in commercial oblivion. He seemed little perturbed by this state of affairs (at least to us), since the works were so clearly uncompromising, so obviously not intended for the marketplace. Yet, like any artist, he surely wished more people had access to his work. Although he was highly regarded in some circles, Brakhage must have been disappointed at his marginalisation by other critics and film scholars. The resultant difficulty in funding his projects must have been frustrating, especially while other, less gifted, talents were acclaimed.
Nevertheless, if Brakhage found lack of recognition discouraging or a cause for bitterness, we, his students, never heard about it from him.
What I remember best about Brakhage's classes is his unbounded enthusiasm for films and filmmakers. The man *loved* movies. He was an immensely knowledgable and insightful scholar of "traditional" filmmaking. Every lecture was a voyage of discovery, whether it was Keaton, Eisenstein, Dreyer, Lang, Goddard, or Hitchcock. And Brakhage was never derrogatory, dismissive, or condescending toward other filmmakers or genres, unlike many academics of the day. If he thought something was crap, you simply didn't see it in his classes. There was too much great stuff to explore to waste time on mediocrity.
Thanks for posting this excellent obituary. Stan Brakhage was a great teacher and an American original. He indelibly shaped the way I think about film, and changed the way I look at life and art. Although it will probably be of little interest to other inmates, I will be thrilled to get the Criterion Collection of his films. For the first time ever, Brakhage's life's work will be readily accessible. I hope this fact was a comfort to Stan and his family.
BTW, to this day, I never sit in the back of a movie theater. Ever.
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