SEPT 28 SUN 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
TRIBUTE TO STAN BRAKHAGE
Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) is considered by many to be the most influential filmmaker of the American avant-garde. Over the course of a 40 plus year career he created over 300 films that ranged in length from a few seconds to several hours, and from psychodrama to document to abstraction. Consistently exploring and redefining film as a means of first-person expression, his eclectic visual stream of consciousness links man and nature via an eye that offers new ways of seeing the rhythms and mysteries of life and the powers of cinema. A second program, October 12, offers a selection of Brakhage’s work in the 1990s. Cosponsored by cinema project.

DESISTFILM US 1954
DIRECTOR: STAN BRAKHAGE The camera joins a drunken adolescent party and participates in the expression of desire and frustration. (7 mins.)

WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING US 1959
DIRECTOR: STAN BRAKHAGE "Brakhage's treatment of the birth of his daughter. Here he unleashes the full power of his technique. . . the result is a picture so forthright, so full of primitive wonder and love, so far beyond civilization in its acceptance that it becomes an experience like few in the history of the movies."—Archer Winsten, NEW YORK POST. (12 mins.)

DOG STAR MAN: PART I US 1962
DIRECTOR: STAN BRAKAGE "Following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man slowly makes his way up a mountain, the film features multiple superimpositions and includes traces of splice marks, painting, and scratches on the film emulsion as some of its densely woven textures. Mythological, cosmological, and physiological. . . it can be seen as one of the most ambitious, lyrical films ever made. . ."—Jonathan Rosenbaum, THE CHICAGO READER. (30 mins.)

MOTHLIGHT US 1963
DIRECTOR: STAN BRAKHAGE "Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black."—Stan Brakhage "Brakhage made MOTHLIGHT without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine."—Jonas Mekas. (4 mins.)
BURIAL PATH US 1978
DIRECTOR: STAN BRAKHAGE “This film begins with the image of a dead bird. The mind moves to forget, as well as to remember. . . this film graphs the process of forgetfulness against all oddities of remembered bird-shape.”—SB. (15mins.)

ARABIC 1
ARABIC 2
US 1980
DIRECTOR: STAN BRAKHAGE “So far as I can tell, they defy verbal interpretation. . .and would, thus, seem to be closer to Music than any previous work given me to do; but if that be true, it is (as composer James Tenney put it to me) that they relate to that relatively small area of musical composition which resists Song and Dance and exists more purely in terms of Sound Events in Time/Space.”—SB. (5 1/2 and 7 mins.)

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS US 1981
DIRECTOR: STAN BRAKHAGE A collage composed entirely of vegetation, THE GARDEN, as the title suggests, is an homage to (and also argument with) Hieronymous Bosch and the flower paintings of Emil Nolde. (2 1/2 mins.)

VISIONS IN MEDITATION #2: MESA VERDE US 1989
DIRECTOR: STAN BRAKHAGE “This meditation takes its visual imperatives from the occasion of Mesa Verde, which I came to see finally as a Time rather than any such solidity as Place.”—(SB). (17 mins.)

PROGRAM 2

OCT 12 SUN 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
STAN BRAKHAGE TRIBUTE
This second program of Stan Brakage’s work (see Sept 28 for Program I) focuses on a nearly twenty year period in which he almost completely abandoned his camera to focus on hand painted works. The program features a number of his 35mm works as well as his last few films, CHINESE SERIES, STAN’S WINDOW and an untitled work in progress. Cosponsored by cinema project.
“One small detail of Brakhage's work that all too often gets left out is that his films are stunningly, even ravishingly beautiful. It's no easy or static prettiness that he was after, but the kind of beauty that cleans out one's sensorium, that seems to scour one's sight all the way from the cornea to the optic nerve, that reorients the very way one sees. Brakhage's films serve as eye-training, both for seeing other films and as an opening on to more imaginative ways of seeing the world.” —Fred Camper, SENSES OF CINEMA.

THE DANTE QUARTET US 1987
“This hand-painted work six years in-the-making (37 in the studying of The Divine Comedy) demonstrates the earthly conditions of "Hell," "Purgatory" (or Transition) and "Heaven" (or "existence is song," which is the closest I'd presume upon heaven from my experience).”—SB. (105 mins.)

CHARTRES SERIES US 1994
“The filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted I must see the Chartres Cathedral. I willingly complied and had an experience of several hours (in the discreet company of French filmmaker Jean-Michele Bouhours) which surely transformed my aesthetics more than any other single experience.”—SB. (9 mins.)

NIGHT MULCH & VERY US 1998
“These films are hand-painted and essentially about the interplay between hypnagogic vision and words, the effect of the one upon the other, the contest between the two.”—SB (6 mins.)

RESSURECTUS EST US 2002
“A hand painted film which first suggests a spread of fragments of plants and flowers, individual petals and bits of twig with multiple colors, with much green 'leafiness'. This gives way to solid yellows and browns of, or suggesting, dried grass and earth (the decay, as it were, of the above mentioned fragments).”—Marilyn Brakhage. (9 mins.)

PANELS FOR THE WALLS OF HEAVEN US/CANADA2002
This film is an entirely hand-painted film composed of a combination of highly complex step-printed super-impositions of hand-painting (at variable speeds), and raw and highly textured strips of hand-painted original film run at speed (24 distinct frames every second). It can be considered the fourth part of what had been called the "Vancouver Island Trilogy"—MB (35 mins.)

CHINESE SERIES US/CANADA 2003
“Scratching on spit-softened emulsion with bare fingernails," Stan completed this work—all he could manage of his long dreamed of "Chinese Series"—in his bed, in the months before his death.”—MB. (2.5 mins.)

STAN’S WINDOW & UNTITLED
US/CANADA 2003
“Titled to echo MARILYN’S WINDOW (‘one of the first films I made after meeting Marilyn’), this photographed film is a self-portrait-at-home—Stan's new, and last "home," in Victoria, B.C.”—MB. (13 mins.)