Stan Brakhage has died
- Mon Mar 10 2003
-
Ain't It Cool News is reporting that legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose 400 films are revered by film scholars while remaining unwatched by most moviegoers (myself included) has died.
Most of your readers probably don't know who Stan Brakhage is, or maybe they know him only from his acting turn in CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL. But they know - for instance - David Fincher, who was highly influenced by Brakhage's films in the credits of SEVEN, or Oliver Stone, who took Brakhage's layering of images and manipulation of film texture and ran with it. Or that tape in THE RING, which certainly bears some marks of Brakhage's style. Or the many filmmakers, both experimental and narrative, who were influenced by Brakhage's modest means of production to attempt to make their own films in a similar manner outside the studio apparatus.
Details about Brakhage's passing are posted on Fred Camper's website.
Those wanting a better glimpse at some of Brakhage's work without going to the extreme of finding a cinematheque that is showing them (or a film library that even has them) will soon have an alternative: The Criterion Collection is releasing on Brakhage, a single-disc compilation of 26 Brakhage films this May.
Note my use of the terms 'cinematheque' and 'film library' -- Brakhage is obscure not only because he eschewed traditional methods of filmmaking. His distribution has been limited to avant-garde venues like SAIC's Siskel Film Center and various art museums, his audience consisting of truly hard-core cineastes and art critics for whom filmmaking is a visual, not dramatic or literary, art. And if there's a filmmaker who embodies this way of looking at and making films, it's Brakhage.
From the blurb on Criterion's site:
Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” Brakhage has turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even actual autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight , were made without using a camera at all.
Instead, Brakhage has pioneered the art of making images directly on film itself––starting with clear leader or exposed film, then drawing, painting, and scratching it by hand. Treating each frame as a miniature canvas, Brakhage can produce only a quarter- to a half-second of film a day, but his visionary style of image-making has changed everything from cartoons and television commercials to MTV music videos and the work of such mainstream moviemakers as Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and Oliver Stone.
I don't feel at all compelled to go take a class on Brakhage or anything (my school does, in fact, offer one), but I'm looking forward to this upcoming Criterion disc with great interest.