Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage stands out as one of the strongest and most influential makers of the subjectively personal film, a master of evocative imagery and an explorer of the full potential of the medium. One of the most energetic and prolific filmmakers in the history of the art, Brakhage has devoted films, and cycles of film, to all the areas of his daily existence he considers vital. He has over sixty films to his credit.

He makes his films much as a painter would make a painting, a poet would write a poem, or a musician compose a piece of music. Brakhage's primary concern is one of vision, of seeing the world more deeply and of sharing his visions with others. Though his films are, on one level, the deeply-felt expressions of an individual, he is also a filmmaker with a strong social conscience. This awareness often manifests itself in works which simultaneously document aspects of the world we share and his own responses to it, in startling revelations of the human experience.

Brakhage received the first American Film Institute award for independent film and video artists (the "Maya Deren Award") in 1986. He lives in Boulder, where teaches at the University of Colorado and continues to evolve his type of film, searching for a beauty seen only in dreams. His coherent and uncompromising approach to filmmaking as a pure art form, combined with the fact that his films are excellent and with his "old man of the mountain" image, has made him a much revered figure, as well as an influential one.

In his earliest films Brakhage adopted a more narrative style, using psychological symbolism representing personal feelings as his main vehicle. In 1958 he got married, and found a new direction to his life and to his work. The situations he found himself in, or the things around him, became the immediate stimuli for and apparent subjects of his films. As he sought "to create the sense of the daily world in which we live, and what it meant to me," the films began to live.

Dog Star Man (1964) was his major effort at cinematic mythmaking, and an attempt at totalizing his filmic endeavors in a single visionary work. It explores the themes of divided consciousness and selfinflicted torment, of earthly concerns and spiritual questing.

The subject matter of his films range as widely as his forms and techniques. The following filmography places them into categories of interest, albeit in a necessarily simplified form. As there are instances of crossover, there are occasional duplicate entries.

Films which reflect upon childhood experience:

Anticipation of the Night (1958)
Scenes From Under Childhood (1967-1970)
The Weir-Falcon Saga (1970)
Star Garden (1974)
Soldiers and Other Cosmic Objects (1977)
Murder Psalm (1980)
Kindering (1987)

Films which deal with male-female relationships:

Reflections on Black (1955)
Cat's Cradle (1959)
Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959)
The Sexual Meditation Series (1970-1972)
Confession (1986)
Faust Films (1987-1988)

Films on birth:

Window Water Baby Moving (1959)
Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961)
Song 5 (1965)

Films on death:

Sirius Remembered (1959)
The Dead (1960)
Burial Path (1978)

Landscape works:

My Mountain, Song 27 (1968)
The Machine of Eden (1970)
The Wold Shadow (1972)
Desert (1976)
Creation (1976)
Made Manifest (1980)

Films which delve into the world of animals and human relationships to it:

The Animals of Eden and After (1970)
The Peaceable Kingdom (1971)
The Presence (1972)
Tragoedia (1976)
The Domain of the Moment (1977)
Bird (1978)
The Loom (1986)

Films on questions of media influence and war:

O Life - A Woe Story - The A-Test News (1963)
Twenty-Third Psalm Branch (1967)
Murder Psalm (1980)
Aftermath (1980)

Films on the processes of memory and autobiography:

Scenes From Under Childhood (1967-1970)
Sincerity and Duplicity (1973-1980)
Tortured Dust (1984)

Films as an equivalent for human thought process:

The Process (1972)
he was born, he suffered, he died (1974)
the Nightmare Series (1978)
@ (1979)
Unconscious London Strata (1981)
the Roman, Arabic and Egyptian series (1979-1984)
Marilyn's Window (1988)
Visions in Meditation (1988 - )

Unphotographable visions/collage films:

Mothlight (1963)
The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981)

Hand‹painted animation films:

Skein (1974)
Nodes (1981)
Nightmusic (1986)
Dante Quartet (1978)

Investigating 3 aspects of city living: the police, the hospital, and the autopsy room:

The Pittsburgh Documents (1971)

An intensive study of political power:

The Governor (1977)

Other films which may or may not belong to above categories:

Interim (1952) (first film)
Desistfilm (1954)
The Way to Shadow Garden (1954)
The Wonder Ring (1955)
Flesh of Morning (1956)
Nightcats (1956)
Daybreak and Whiteye (1957)
Loving (1957)
Blue Moses (1962)
The Art of Vision (1965)
Fire of Waters (1965)
Pasht (1965)
Two: Creeley/McClure (1965)
Songs in 8mm (1964-69)
The Horseman, the Woman, and the Moth (1968)
Lovemaking (1968)
Foxfire Childwatch and other short films of 1971
Eye Myth and other short films of 1972
The Text of Light (1974)
The Stars are Beautiful (1974)
Purity and After and other short films of 1978
Salome and other short films of 1980
Hell Spit Flexion (1983)
Jane (1985)