stan brakhage
Stan Brakhage (14 January 1933 - 9 March 2003) completed his first film, Interim, in 1952 at the age of nineteen, and as of 1998 had completed 300 personal, independent works ranging in length from 9 seconds to four hours and incorporating a wide variety of innovative and uniquely expressive forms and techniques. He wrote, in addition, several books, including Metaphors on Vision, A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book, The Brakhage Lectures, Seen, Film Biographies, The Brakhage Scrapbook, Film at Wit's End, I...Sleeping and The Domain of Aura.
Brakhage lectured extensively over the past 35 years at universities, colleges, museums, galleries, film societies and film festivals throughout the world, his interests and areas of knowledge including the histories and aesthetics of music, painting, poetry and film. In addition to his public lecturing, Brakhage taught film history and aesthetics from 1969 through 1981 at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and since 1981 had been teaching in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was a Distinguished Professor.
Brakhage lived for many years with his growing family in the Colorado mountains near Boulder and during that time made films primarily inspired by and expressive of the environment in which he lived (though that source being "as diverse as to have included love-making, childbirth, children's play, mountains in snow-storm, potted plants, flames of heart and forest fires, trips to town and, even, journeys around the world"). Since 1986 Brakhage had been living in the town of Boulder, where he gave ongoing support to many younger filmmakers as well as continuing his own prolific output of work, creating work that was photographed, hand-painted on film and, most recently, films created by scratching and gouging the film emulsion itself.
Stan Brakhage received a number of honours and awards for his contributions to the arts, including: The Brussels World Fair Protest Award (1958), Film Culture's Fourth Independent Film Award (1962), a Rockefeller Fellowship (1967-1969), three Museum of Modern Art Retrospectives (1971, 1977 & 1996), a Brandeis Citation (1973), the Colorado Governor's Award for the Arts and Humanities (1974), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1978), the Jimmy Fyan Morris Memorial Foundation Award (1979), a Telluride Film Festival Medallion (1981), an Honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute (1981), the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists (1986), the Denver International Film Festival Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Art of Film (1988), a University of Colorado Medal (1988), and the MacDowell Colony Medal (1990).
STAN BRAKHAGE
A selected filmography
1952 Interim
1954 Desistfilm
1955 The Wonder Ring
1955 Reflections on Black
1956 Flesh of Morning
1957 Daybreak and Whiteye
1958 Anticipation of the Night
1959 Cat's Cradle
1959 Sirius Remembered
1959 Window Water Baby Moving
1960 The Dead
1961 Thigh Line Lyre Triangular
1962 Blue Moses
1963 Mothlight
1964 Dog Star Man
1964 The Art of Vision
1965 Songs 1-22
1965 Pasht
1965 Bluewhite
1965 Blood's Tone
1965 Vein
1965 Fire of Waters
1966 23rd Psalm Branch
1967 Eye Myth
1968 Lovemaking
1968 The Horseman, The Woman and the Moth
1970 Scenes from Under Childhood
1970 The Weir-Falcon Saga
1970 The Machine of Eden
1970 Sexual Meditation:No.1:Motel
1971 The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes
1971 Angels
1971 Door
1971 Western History
1971 The Peaceable Kingdom
1974 The Stars are Beautiful
1974 Star Garden
1974 The Text of Light
1976 Airs
1976 Tragoedia
1977 The Governor
1980 Sincerity
1980 Songs 1-14
1981 The Garden of Earthly Delights
1981 Roman Numeral Series
1982 Unconscious London Strata
1982 Arabics
1983 Hell Spit Flexicon
1984 Tortured Dust
1984 Egyptian Series
1986 Jane; Purgation
1986 Night Music
1987 Hell Itself
1987 Existence is Song
1988 Rage Net
1988 I...Dreaming
1988 Marilyn's Window
1990 City Streaming
1991 Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse
1991 Agnus Dei Kinder Synapse
1992 Interpolations 1-V
1992 Boulder Blues and Pearls
1992 For Marilyn
1993 A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea
1996 Commingled Containers
1996 Beautiful Funerals
1996 The Fur of Home
1996 Blue Value
1996 Polite Madness
1997 Divertimento
1997 Self Song / Death Song
1997 The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm
1997 Yggdrasill Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind
1998 (...) (ellipses) parts I, II, III
See also:Underground Cinema: The 1960's
