On March 9, 2003, in his 70th year, Stan Brakhage's body finally succumbed to the cancer that had raged within it for over eight years. It was only then that the torrential outpouring of films, writings, and teachings, begun when he was not yet out of his teens, came to an end. During 51 years of uninterrupted activity, Brakhage finished 380 films ranging from under a minute to several hours in length, and left countless lectures, manifestos on aesthetic theory, historical essays, and innumerable letters and interviews. We can now begin to approach the enormity of Brakhage's achievement, remarkable in the history of cinema not only for its quantity and range, but also for the depth and consistency of his radical agenda. In fact, no filmmaker since Griffith, including such giants as Renoir, Welles, Rossellini and Cassavetes, had more of an impact on the practice of cinema as personal artistic expression. Aspects of his influence can be seen in all forms of filmmaking-including Hollywood films, music videos, and television commercials-although this fact is still little recognized or understood. Along with more popularly acknowledged artists such as Warhol, Coltrane, Dylan and Godard, he helped define the extraordinary revolutionizing art that came of age between the late Fifties and the early Sixties.

Brakhage was at heart a fighter, whose self-proclaimed mission was to live his life as an artist in pragmatic postwar America. He struggled unceasingly on many levels: against conformities of experience, in defiance of social taboos, toward an awakening of the senses, and by defying the limitations of his own body (filming the 1974 The Text of Light ruined his back; doctors believe that his cancer was caused by the pigments he used in some of his last films). An indefatigable public speaker, he was renowned for his impatience with stupid audiences (I still remember his stunned silence when, after the 1971 world premiere of Eyes in Ken Jacobs's Binghamton class, a literature professor arrogantly proclaimed that "there was more emotion in any single shot of The Graduate than in all of Brakhage's films combined"). His work was a celebration of re-feeling, re-thinking, and re-sensing the world through cinema; those too close-minded to share in his explorations failed utterly. On the other hand, thousands saw differently after encountering Brakhage and his work. He established the precedent of appearing with his films, and, beginning in the late Fifties, this became the norm for all independent filmmakers. Brakhage delighted in being a provocateur who would routinely come down from his Colorado Rocky Mountain to the big cities and shake things up (during a notorious Millennium screening in the Seventies, he berated New Yorkers as being stuck on "structuralism"), but he was also a tireless raconteur who enjoyed evening after evening of yarn-spinning and reminiscences.

As a young man in the early Fifties, Brakhage found film in a state of nearly complete dependence on an industry limited to conventional dramatic or documentary narratives. A serious devotee of classical music, poetry, and painting, he soon realized that a pure poetic cinema had barely begun to be explored. With such films as Cat's Cradle (59) and Anticipation of the Night (58) he moved into uncharted territory, discovering meaning in the forms and rhythms of ordinary objects and the unstated dramas of everyday life (it was crucial for him to confront hidden areas of activity, such as birth, sex, family life, and death); one of his most radical breakthroughs was to use his private, sometimes most intimate life as primary subject. He comprehended hidden meanings in his portrayals of daily events gleaned from ancient mythologies and the world heritage of artistic discourse. Brakhage weaved dizzyingly between sometimes apparently unrelated images to make ambiguous and mysterious connections. While some of Brakhage's films were ostensibly complex narratives (as with his famed 1959 child birth film Window Water Baby Moving), his most deeply original works were anti-narrative visual explorations of form and structure (The Art of Vision, 65, A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea, 91); he expected the viewer to move beyond the objectives and expectations of traditional cinema.

Brakhage's ultimate challenge was both to transcend the machine and use it to create an embodiment of consciousness, of first-person sensibility. To this end he created a radically new cinematic lexicon: he revolutionized edited space through intricate rhythmical cutting (not seriously considered as an aesthetic option since Vertov); compositional space through handheld, expressively weaving camera gestures (greatly extending pioneering efforts by Hammid and Menken); and dimensional space through meticulous multiple superimpositions within a single frame (not used as a primary device since the silent era). Before he articulated its value, viewers never saw moving, handheld imagery, except in news footage or documentaries (cinema verité was still in its infancy when he made Anticipation of the Night. With Brakhage, the camera became an instrument capable of nuanced subjective inquiry, the extension of a distinctive visual and physical sensibility. Film and its illusion of movement (as well as the rupturing of that illusion) became an analogue of human sentience. Brakhage regarded film's malleable material as a living tissue: he scratched, painted, dyed, collaged, and overlaid patterns directly onto the filmstrip; during his last days at home, with his mobility entirely limited, he carved into film emulsion with his fingernails. His array of techniques, while exact and complex, could seem crudely rough-edged by comparison with the slick camerawork and seamless narrative editing of commercial cinema. On its deepest level, Brakhage's lifework was an exploration of light, as it informs and is central to the essence of our being - no other moving image maker has focused so resolutely and with such variety on this, and his oeuvre stands in stark contrast to an electronic era that increasingly de-emphasizes firsthand sensual experience.

Brakhage was part of America's first generation of independent filmmakers who practiced filmmaking throughout their entire lives. His own role within this larger endeavor was to fight for the filmmaker as poetic visionary artist, equal to and in frequent dialogue with the traditional arts, and this insistence on defining himself foremost as an artist galvanized thousands of filmmakers and students over the decades. Although it is impossible to divide his work neatly into periods, the earliest films were mostly quasi-narrative "psychodramas" (Desistfilm, 54), those made during his middle years were largely centered on his family life (Scenes From Under Childhood, 67-70), and the later films increasingly explored what he called "hypnogogic" vision (Chartres Series, 94), frequently reducing all imagery to non-representational essences, much as abstract painters had done over the past century. His work made bridges between film and poetry by learning from the rhythms and mythos of Pound, Stein, Creeley, and Duncan; music through the structures of Bach, Webern, and Feldman, painting through the expressive gestures of De Kooning and Pollock, and collage through the material sensitivity of Cornell (with whom he collaborated on several films in the Fifties). Sometimes drawn to grand statements, he was most eloquent when dealing with the humility and fragility of human existence: Songs, a 30-part film cycle epic in scope but small in scale, remains possibly his most intimate work, incorporating and elevating the understanding of traditional "home movies" to the status of art.

The politics of art in recent years relegated Brakhage to the margins of topical discourse. During an era in which art, much of it slavishly literal, became the primary tool for social activism, his work seemed hermetic and apolitical; yet many of his films, such as 23rd Psalm Branch or Murder Psalm are deeply political. Brakhage depended on a largely intuitive creative process (he always worked directly with his camera original when editing rather than using a trial work print) that denied fashionable theoretical underpinnings, instead imbuing his work with mystical and metaphysical meaning. Brakhage was heir to the tradition of Emerson and Whitman - updated through mid-20th century eyes - in which art was a sacred and revelatory experience. He always understood that he was a throwback (even while he began absorbing "chance" elements into his films in the early Sixties, he wrote to P. Adams Sitney, "Cage has laid down the greatest aesthetic net of this century"); this became increasingly true over the years when vision as ultimate experience (the overwhelming majority of his films are silent) and the heroic, egocentric point of view became identified with continued male cultural domination. Yet Brakhage's art is in many ways decidedly antiheroic, focusing on the seemingly mundane through deglamorizing techniques: the filmic experiences he offers are diametrically opposed to the masculine, controlled single viewpoint reinforced by virtually all industrial filmmaking. For Brakhage, the eyes - his and ours - merely serve as portals through which the rest of the body and mind must be engaged.

In short, the main reasons Brakhage's films are still little known remain the same as when he first emerged and was briefly embraced during the Sixties: in contrast with the seductive high-glitz tactility of Matthew Barney or the chic philosophizing and clever conceptualizations of Bill Viola, both of whom have been totally embraced by the high-art collector culture, all of Brakhage's values - the core of his aesthetics - exist to resist being handily consumed and canonized. Brakhage celebrates life in all its sprawling dimensions, embracing even its blemishes and uncertainties, and this remains as distant from society's ideals as ever.

More than any other filmmaker of the past half century, Brakhage became the reference point for critics, programmers, educators, and artists in defining and disputing the radical redefinition of cinema as personal art. During the late Fifties, Jonas Mekas positioned him as the primary figurehead for the New American Cinema, and soon after, for the burgeoning international avant-garde. Mainstream film critics cited his work in decrying the rising underground movement - in the Sixties Stanley Kauffman suggested he was wasting his life; in the early Seventies Andrew Sarris stated that " Brakhage was looking through the wrong end of a telescope." His influence, however indirectly, continued to be evident in the work of scores of younger independent filmmakers as diverse as Su Friedrich, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Nathaniel Dorsky, mainstream filmmakers such as Oliver Stone, Terence Malick, and Werner Herzog, and video artists ranging from Sadie Benning to Viola.



Though his body of work is still relatively unknown, it will survive "the test of time" and gradually become more widely appreciated and understood. It is difficult to dip in to just one or two of his films and grasp the depth of his unique vision: the few well-known, easily accessible, and usually sensational works such as Mothlight (63) or The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (71), don't demand the patience and commitment necessary of the large majority of his films. This deeper understanding will no doubt emerge as the many dozens of Brakhage's lesser-known but artistically rich titles are rediscovered and reappraised.

Amazingly, Stan Brakhage accomplished his goals - he made a lasting place for the personal voice and the filmmaker as poet in a medium. One of his films (Dog Star Man [62]) was included among the first ten films listed in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. The Museum of Modern Art recently completed purchasing all of his films for their permanent collection. Recent and future retrospectives include the Rotterdam Film Festival, the National Gallery in Washington, and multiple venues throughout Japan, while dozens of memorial tributes have been announced. A Brakhage Study Center, containing copies of all of his films, papers, and ephemera, is being planned for his hometown of Boulder, Colorado. This will represent the first time since Lumière and Eisenstein that a museum will be devoted to the work of a single artist whose principal medium was film, a fitting tribute to one of the last active major filmmakers still working exclusively with celluloid.

As electronic communication continues to make the machine era an ever more distant memory, Brakhage's lifework will be more clearly understood as a pivotal swan song to the analogue and physical paradigms of the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather than fading, his legacy will survive, continue to inform us about visual perception, and become widely appreciated as a singular cornerstone in the history of art.

Steve Anker is the Dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts and programmed the San Francisco Cinematheque for nearly 20 years.



on to page 2: selected quotes

© 2003 by Steve Anker

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