Stan Brakhage The 1960s and beginning of recognition Who is Stan Brakhage? Brakhage began to receive recognition in exhibitions and film publications, including Film Culture, which gave awards to several of his films, What did Brakhage do in the 1960s? From 1961 to 1964, Brakhage worked on a series of 5 films known as the Dog Star Man cycle. When was Brakhage recognized? in the early 1960s
What is so great about Brakhage?
What is so great about Stan Brakhage?
When Brakhage's early films had been exhibited in the 1950s, they had often been met with derision, but in the early 1960s Brakhage began to receive recognition in exhibitions and film publications, including Film Culture, which gave awards to several of his films, including The Dead, in 1962. The award statement, written by Jonas Mekas, a critic who would later become an influential experimental filmmaker in his own right, cited Brakhage for bringing to cinema "an intelligence and subtlety that is usually the province of the older arts." Writer/critic Guy Davenport, an ardent admirer of Brakhage, invited him to the University of Kentucky in March 1964 and tried to get him a residency there.  From 1961 to 1964, Brakhage worked on a series of 5 films known as the Dog Star Man cycle. The Brakhages moved to Lump Gulch, Colorado in 1964, though Brakhage continued to make regular visits to New York. During one of those visits, the 16mm film equipment he had been using was stolen. Brakhage couldn't afford to replace it, instead opting to buy cheaper 8mm film equipment. He soon began working in the format, producing a 30-part cycle of 8mm films known as the Songs from 1964 to 1969. The Songs include one of Brakhage's most acclaimed films, 23rd Psalm Branch, a response to the Vietnam War and its presentation in the mass media.  Brakhage began teaching film history and aesthetics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969, commuting from his home in Colorado. CANNOTANSWER
He soon began working in the format, producing a 30-part cycle of 8mm films known as the Songs from 1964 to 1969.
James Stanley Brakhage ( ; January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003), better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.

Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a large and diverse body of work, exploring a variety of formats, approaches and techniques that included handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film, collage film and the use of multiple exposures. Interested in mythology and inspired by music, poetry, and visual phenomena, Brakhage sought to reveal the universal, in particular exploring themes of birth, mortality, sexuality, and innocence. His films are for the most part silent.

Brakhage's films are often noted for their expressiveness and lyricism. While they were for many years obscure and hard to find, many are now readily available on DVD as well as other media.



Biography
Born Robert Sanders in Kansas City, Missouri on January 14, 1933, Brakhage was adopted and renamed three weeks after his birth by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage.

As a child Brakhage was featured on radio as a boy soprano, and sang in church choirs and as a soloist at other events. He was raised in Denver, Colorado, where he attended South High School with the filmmakers Larry Jordan and Stan Phillips, and the composers Jim Tenney, and Ramiro Cortes. At South he and other friends (Larry Hackstaff, Walt Newcomb, Gordon Rosenblum, Tom O'Brien, Stan Phillips, and others) formed a social and intellectual group, calling themselves "the Gadflies", after Socrates.

Brakhage briefly attended Dartmouth College on a scholarship before dropping out to make films. He completed his first film, Interim, at the age of 19; the music for the film was composed by his school friend James Tenney. In 1953, Brakhage moved to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, then called the California School of Fine Arts. He found the atmosphere in San Francisco more rewarding, associating with poets Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, but did not complete his education, instead moving to New York City in 1954. There he met a number of notable artists, including Maya Deren (in whose apartment he briefly lived), Willard Maas, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Joseph Cornell, and John Cage. Brakhage would collaborate with the latter two, making two films with Cornell (Gnir Rednow and Centuries of June) and using Cage's music for the soundtrack of his first color film, In Between. Brakhage is recorded to have said "If there is one single filmmaker that I owe the most to for the crucial development of my own film making it would be Marie Menken."

Brakhage spent the next few years living in near poverty, depressed about what he saw as the failure of his work. He briefly considered suicide. While living in Denver, Brakhage met Mary Jane Collom (see Jane Wodening), whom he married in late 1957. Brakhage tried to make money on his films, but had to take a job making industrial shorts to support his family. In 1958, Jane gave birth to the first of the five children they would have together, a daughter called Myrrena, an event Brakhage recorded for his 1959 film Window Water Baby Moving.

The 1960s and beginning of recognition
When Brakhage's early films had been exhibited in the 1950s, they had often been met with derision, but in the early 1960s Brakhage began to receive recognition in exhibitions and film publications, including Film Culture, which gave awards to several of his films, including The Dead, in 1962. The award statement, written by Jonas Mekas, a critic who would later become an influential experimental filmmaker in his own right, cited Brakhage for bringing to cinema "an intelligence and subtlety that is usually the province of the older arts." Writer/critic Guy Davenport, an ardent admirer of Brakhage, invited him to the University of Kentucky in March 1964 and tried to get him a residency there.

From 1961 to 1964, Brakhage worked on a series of five films known as the Dog Star Man cycle. The Brakhages moved to Lump Gulch, Colorado, in 1964, though Brakhage continued to make regular visits to New York. During one of those visits, the 16mm film equipment he had been using was stolen. Brakhage couldn't afford to replace it, instead opting to buy cheaper 8mm film equipment. He soon began working in the format, producing a 30-part cycle of 8mm films known as the Songs from 1964 to 1969. The Songs include one of Brakhage's most acclaimed films, 23rd Psalm Branch, a response to the Vietnam War and its presentation in the mass media.

Brakhage began teaching film history and aesthetics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969, commuting from his home in Colorado.

1970s and 1980s

Brakhage explored new approaches to filmmaking in the 1970s. In 1971, he completed a set of three films inspired by public institutions in the city of Pittsburgh. These three films--Eyes, about the city police, Deus Ex, filmed in a hospital, and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, depicting autopsy—are collectively known as "The Pittsburgh Trilogy". In 1974, Brakhage made the feature-length The Text of Light, consisting entirely of images of light refracted in a glass ashtray. In 1979, he experimented with Polavision, a format marketed by Polaroid, making about five 2 minute films. The whereabouts of these films are now unknown. He continued his visual explorations of landscape and the nature of light and thought process, and through the late 1970s and early 1980s produced filmic equivalents of what he termed "moving visual thinking" in several series of photographic abstractions known as the Roman, Arabic, and Egyptian series.

Stan Brakhage taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder off and on, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He separated from Jane in 1986, and in 1989 married his second wife, Marilyn; the two went on to have two children together. In the late 1980s, Brakhage returned to making sound films, with the four-part Faustfilm cycle, and also completed the hand-painted film, The Dante Quartet.

Brakhage was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1989.

1990s – 2000s and death
Brakhage remained extremely productive through the last two decades of his life, sometimes working in collaboration with other filmmakers, including his University of Colorado colleague Phil Solomon.  Several more sound films were completed, including Passage Through: A Ritual, edited to the music of Philip Corner, and Christ Mass Sex Dance and Ellipses Reel 5, both with music by James Tenney. He also produced the major meditations on childhood, adolescence, aging and mortality collectively known as the "Vancouver Island Quartet," as well as numerous hand-painted works.

Brakhage was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1996, and his bladder was removed. The surgery seemed successful, but the cancer eventually returned. In a video interview in 2002, he explained that his cancer was caused by the toxicity of the aniline dyes he had used to paint directly onto film.

Brakhage retired from teaching and moved to Canada in 2002, settling with his second wife Marilyn and their two sons in Victoria, British Columbia. Brakhage died there on March 9, 2003, aged 70. The last footage Brakhage shot has been made available under the title Work in Progress. At the time of his death, Brakhage was also working on the Chinese Series, a work that was achieved by scratching directly on to film, a technique that was employed by the French artist Isidore Isou in 1950.

Though not a practicing Christian during his adulthood, Brakhage requested a traditional Anglican service. The funeral was attended largely by family members, as well as a few friends from the filmmaking world, and included a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

Influence
In 1961, Jonas Mekas wrote that Brakhage is "one of the four or five most authentic film artists working in cinema anywhere, and perhaps the most original filmmaker in America today". Among Brakhage's students were Eric Darnell, the director of Antz, as well as the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and he is featured in their student film Cannibal! The Musical.

Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ uses Brakhage's painted film style to depict the death of Jesus on the cross. Scorsese has framed samples of Brakhage's films on his office wall.

The work of contemporary film and video artist Raymond Salvatore Harmon (1974- ) has been compared to Brakhage's abstract films.

The credits of the film Seven (1995), with their scratched emulsion, rapid cutaways and bursts of light are in Brakhage's style.

The opening track of Stereolab's album Dots and Loops (1997), "Brakhage", is named after him.

Sonic Youth, joined by percussionist Tim Barnes, played along with silent Stan Brakhage films at a 2003 benefit show for Anthology Film Archives. The live recording is available as SYR6: Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui.

The concluding credits to The Jacket (2005) are an homage to Brakhage's 1963 film Mothlight.

The opening titles to the BBC television series The Living and the Dead (2016) use an excerpt from Mothlight.

The 2011 film The Tree of Life and Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) include sequences reminiscent of Brakhage's work.

Filmography

Writings
Brakhage wrote a number of books about films, including Metaphors on Vision (1963), A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book (1971), Film Biographies (1977, Turtle Island Books) and the posthumously published Telling Time:  Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker (2003).

Archives
Brakhage's archival material, including correspondence, manuscripts, and audio recordings, are held by the University of Colorado as part of the collection of the Brakhage Center. Brakhage's films, including original elements and prints, are held by the Academy Film Archive in the Stan Brakhage Collection. The Academy Film Archive has preserved and restored many Brakhage films and continues to do so; films preserved include Window Water Baby Moving, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, Anticipation of the Night, and Interim.

References

External links
 Filmography by Fred Camper.
 
Ocular Spectacular
 On Stan Brakhage
 A Conversation Between Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage
 Stan Brakhage bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
 Directory of links to pages about Brakhage
 Rental of Brakhage's films in 16mm and other formats
 Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
 They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?
 Magic & Images/ Images & Magic, by David Levi Strauss —an opening paper for a conference at Princeton University, "Magic and the American Avant-Garde Cinema", March 11, 2006.
 The Flame is Ours The Letters of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure1961-1978 Edited by Christopher Luna at Big Bridge 15
 The act of seeing with Stan's eyes, by Doris Peternel

1933 births
2003 deaths
People from Kansas City, Missouri
American experimental filmmakers
American adoptees
Deaths from cancer in British Columbia
Dartmouth College alumni
Film theorists
People from Boulder, Colorado
People from Denver
Visual music artists
Drawn-on-film animators
Collage filmmakers
Dog Star Man is a series of short experimental films, all directed by Stan Brakhage, featuring Jane Wodening. It was released in instalments between 1961 and 1964 and comprises a prelude and four parts. In 1992,  Dog Star Man was included in its entirety in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation.

Described as a "cosmological epic" and "creation myth" (particularly the Prelude), Dog Star Man illustrates the odyssey of a bearded woodsman (Brakhage) climbing through a snow-covered mountain with his dog to chop down a tree. While doing so, he witnesses various mystical visions with various recurring imagery such as a woman, child, nature, and the cosmos while making his ascent.

The five short films all form one larger film, and they are almost always shown together as one film. In 1965, Brakhage used the same footage from Dog Star Man and re-edited it into a much longer film, The Art of Vision. Both are generally considered the greatest works of his first mature period.

Background 
After editing and completing Cat's Cradle, Brakhage began filming Dog Star Man. At the time when he began work on the project, Brakhage had not set on any particular idea on what the project would be about. In addition to this, he had also faced different sets of crisis including the questioning of his distant relationship with his wife Jane at the time, experiencing visions, and contemplations of death and decay. The filming of Dog Star Man took on gradually as Brakhage also worked on The Dead.

Structure 
Ever since he commissioned the idea of the project, Brakhage had already had a prelude and four parts in mind. Dog Star Man, like Brakhage's other works, is characterized and known for their abstract imagery and techniques such as scratching and punching holes into the film. While the work is considered difficult and unorthodox by many, there is a general structure to the narrative of the film cycle that comprises the prelude and four parts.

Prelude 
The opening of Dog Star Man is entitled Prelude and runs at around 26 minutes, making it one of the longer parts of the film cycle. Brakhage described the Prelude as a "created dream" for the film as opposed to Surrealism in which the work itself is inspired by the dream of the artist. In it, the Prelude contains many of the images that recur throughout the rest of the film series, creating a visual leitmotif of the many symbols and concepts of the series of films. There are also many instances to what Brakhage calls "close-eyed vision". Broadly, the Prelude exemplifies, among other things, the creation of the universe.

Part I 
The longest of the film cycle, running at about 30 minutes, Part I comprises most of the narrative of the film cycle in which the woodsman struggles with his journey up the mountain along with his dog. Unlike the Prelude, where there are many instances of superimposed images that are more abstract to the eye, Part I is more impressionistic. Major parts of the film are in slow-motion; others, in time-lapse photography, speeding up motion. One of the most important images in Part I is the mountain that Brakhage attempts to climb.

Part II 
In contrast to the lengthy running times of the earlier films, Part II begins a series of shorter segments that run from around 5–7 minutes. Its central focus is on the birth of a child which was filmed on black and white film stock as a part of Brakhage's home movies that he shot during the time; stylistically, the filming of childbirth in an almost documentary-like way is quite similar to Window Water Baby Moving. Two layers of imagery are imposed over one another, suggesting that the woodsman's life is passing right before his eyes.

Legacy
The entire film (Prelude and Parts 1 through 4) was named to the National Film Registry in 1992.

Below are the individual films of the series and their release dates:
 Prelude: Dog Star Man (1961) 
 Dog Star Man: Part I (1962) 
 Dog Star Man: Part II (1963) 
 Dog Star Man: Part III (1964) 
 Dog Star Man: Part IV (1964)

The film is part of the by Brakhage: an Anthology collection DVD from The Criterion Collection.

The film has received a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 9 reviews including praises from film critics like J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

References

External links 
 Description of Brakhage's work.
 
 
 
 
 
 Dog Star Man essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 , pages 606-607
BFI

United States National Film Registry films
Films directed by Stan Brakhage
Films without speech
American avant-garde and experimental films
American films
1960s avant-garde and experimental films
Non-narrative films Thigh Line Lyre Triangular is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage, released in 1961, which depicts the birth of the director's third child, a daughter named Neowyn. The film, which involves painting and hand-scratching over photographic images, is more abstract than the director's earlier Window Water Baby Moving, which documented the birth of Brakhage's first-born, Myrrenna.

Production

Stan Brakhage felt that Window Water Baby Moving had insufficiently captured his emotions at the birth of his child, and intended Thigh Line Lyre Triangular as an improvement.

Only at a crisis do I see both the sense as I've been trained to see it (that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic, colors as we've been trained to call a color a color, and so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through the optic nerves - spots before my eyes, so to speak - and it's a very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I've seen that every time a child was born .... Now none of that was in WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING; and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed all of my seeing at such a time.Brakhage Scrapbook: Stan Brakhage Collected Writings 1964-1980, edited by Robert A. Haller (1982) New York: Documentext, p253
Like many Brakhage works, Thigh Line Lyre Triangular is a silent film. Unlike Window Water Baby Moving, it was photographed in a hospital. The camera films Jane Brakhage's face and vulva from a low-angle shot near her feet. A layer of paint and deliberate scratches on the surface of the film render the birth itself almost unintelligible. Brakhage himself does not appear in the film, as he intended to "[centre] the occasion in my own eyes."

Reception

Thigh Line Lyre Triangular is often contrasted against Brakhage's previous "birth film," Window Water Baby Moving. William R. Barr wrote that Thigh Line Lyre Triangular lacked the "urgency and intensity" of the earlier film, nevertheless describing it as "a layered, integrated affirmation of all creativity." Steven Dillon wrote that the film “attains the complexity of a lyrical poem by balancing subjective, painterly vision with emancipator, documentary effect.” R. Bruce Elder notes "the irony that [Brakhage], who had so vigorously rejected symbolism, resorted to using symbolism in Thigh Line Lyre Triangular.” James Peterson likened the film to the 1930s and 1940s art of Surrealist painter Joan Miró.

References

External links
 

1961 animated films
1961 films
Films directed by Stan Brakhage
Drawn-on-film animated films