Filmmaker
Edited by David E. JamesStan Brakhage: Filmmaker is a collection of essays, photographs, personal statements, and reminiscences about the celebrated avant garde filmmaker who died in 2003. The director of nearly four hundred short films, including Dog Star Man, Parts I-IV, and The Roman Numeral Series, Brakhage is widely recognized as one of the great artists of the medium. His shorts eschewed traditional narrative structure, and his innovations in fast cutting, hand-held camerawork, and multiple superimpositions created an unprecedentedly rich texture of images that provided the vocabulary for the explosion of independent filmmaking in the 1960s.
Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker chronicles both the director's personal and formal development. The essays in this book-by historians, filmmakers, and other artists-assess Brakhage's contributions to the aesthetic and political history of filmmaking, from his emergence on the film scene and the establishment of his reputation, to the early-1980s. The result is a remarkable tribute to this lyrical, visionary artist.
"The scant attention given Stan Brakhage's one-man reinvention of motion pictures is a scandal of academic cinema studies. This generous collection of essays and appreciations, contributed by a wide variety of poets, critics, scholars, and fellow filmmakers, is most illuminating-it beams a welcome light on the terra incognita of Brakhage's accomplishment." —J. Hoberman, Village Voice film critic
"Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker contains arguments and perspectives on Brakhage's work I've not seen before. The combination of academic perspectives and those of filmmakers is an especially original and appropriate way to treat Brakhage, who always hoped his films would inspire new ways of seeing and making, and is a major strength of this fine book, which offers a variety of new and interesting ways of thinking about Brakhage's films." —Fred Camper, independent film scholar
"To sing in praise of Stan Brakhage is to sing in praise of cinema—daring us to see as we have never seen before. These wonderfully diverse essays take the measure of one of cinema's great visionaries." —Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary and editor, Maya Deren and the American Avant Garde
"A pity that Brakhage did not live to see the book, because the essayists listed in the table of contents read like a Who's Who of the avant-garde... All these folks came to praise Brakhage, not to bury him. Contemporary film student need to know that such an abstract visual talent as Brakhage could succeed in the US, and therein lies the book's value. Recommended." —Choice
"An anthology praising perhaps the best-known and most widely-celebrated American avant-garde filmmaker." —Communications Booknotes Quarterly
"(A) remarkable-and remarkably compelling—portrait of Brakhage as artist, theorist, and friend.... The highlight of this collection is the selection of reminiscences by Brakhage's friends, artists and filmmakers." —Senses of Cinema
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