STAN BRAKHAGE

Stan Brakhage was an avant-garde filmmaker who worked in film from 1952 up until his death in 2003. Brakhage was born in 1933 in Kansas City, Missouri and worked as a live radio and recording soprano throughout his childhood. He entered Dartmouth College but dropped out as a freshman to pursue his interest in film. Two years later he enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute where he met many beat generation poets such as Robert, Duncan, Robert Creely, Kenneth Rexroth and Louis Zukofsky who would influence Brakhage's ideology. In 1954, Brakhage relocated to New York City where became acquainted with John Cage, Edgard Varese, Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, and others. In 1955, Brakhage was commissioned by artist Joseph Cornell to make the film Wonder Ring. After watching this film, it is noticeably the predecessor of his style present in later films. The camera was an extension of Brakhage's eye. He recorded phrases of his experience to present a feeling as it develops in time. In 1964, his 16mm camera was stolen and resulted in a five year period focused on 8mm works.

The Wonder Ring, Stan Brakhage, 6 minutes, 1955

Many of Brackage's films focus on the loss of innocent and imaginative vision in humans as they age in a society. Other themes in his film are sexuality and mortality. Brakhage was a man on a progressive journey to abandon the material connection the brain makes with the eye. In his book Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage writes “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.” Brakhage was an innovator of process. In his films such as Dante Quartet, Water for Maya, and Love Song, Brakhage would paint on a reel of film and sometimes use multiple exposures to give the span of the film's length continuity when projected.

Dante Quartet, Stan Brakhage, 6 Min, 1987

Brakhage is considered to be an artist who created art for art's sake. His ideas, process, and themes are of great inspiration to me. Brakhage is a unique artist because of his unrefined eye. He used color, light, and an emulation of the eye's motion and saccades through a camera lens to give a raw aesthetic. I anticipate exploring the medium of film, but regardless of my medium his mode of storytelling and ideas on vision will influence my process and product. For my senior seminar exhibit I am leaning away from the idea of formal painting and more towards mixed media and projection art to create my body of work.

Desistfilm, Stan Brakhage, 6 minutes, 1954