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STAN BRAKHAGE IN HIS OWN WORDS:
SELECTED QUOTES
a Film Comment online exclusive
You see, I'm a young player in the game and, at this stage, almost all my movements and reactions are instinctive and geared towards finding something out rather than stating something already discovered. In this context, all my films (and poems) are experimental. Naturally, some of the experiments blow up in my face; but in the creative mind, unlike the scientific laboratory, the explosions are not deadly. They always provide the propulsion for movement into new unexplored realms. The only artistic expressions I worry about are those that go "fluff." I've never had a fluff film. The expense of movie making, differing from the paper and ink of poem making, has necessitated a thematic understanding of what I was going to do before the camera would begin chewing up film. - from a letter to a distributor, 1954
This is to introduce myself. I am young and I believe in magic. I am learning how to cast spells. My profession is transforming. I am what is known as "an artist." Three years ago I made a discovery which caused me dis-ease at the time: neither the society in which I had grown up nor my society of that moment, my college, knew what to do with me. They were wary of me.- Dartmouth, 1955
I am devoting my life to what is inappropriately called "The Experimental Film," in America, because I am an artist and, as such, am convinced that freedom of personal expression (that which is called "experiment" by those who don't understand it) is the natural beginning of any art, and because I love film and am excited above everything else by the possibilities inherent in film as a means of aesthetic expression. - in answer to a questionnaire, 1957
I would say I grew very quickly as a film artist once I got rid of drama as prime source of inspiration. I began to feel that all history, all life, all that I would have as material with which to work, would have to come from the inside of me out rather than as some form imposed from the outside in. I had the concept of everything radiating out of me, and that the more personal or egocentric I would become, the deeper I would reach and the more I could touch these universal concerns which would involve all man. -interview with P. Adams Sitney, Metaphors On Vision, 1963
OF NECESSITY I BECOME INSTRUMENT FOR THE PASSAGE OF INNER VISION, THRU ALL MY SENSIBILITIES, INTO ITS EXTERNAL FORM. My most active part in this process is to increase all my sensibilities (so that all films arise out of some total area of being or full life) AND, at the given moment of possible creation to act only out of necessity. In other words, I am principally concerned with revelation. -letter to Sitney, 1963
All of the following are from "Stan Brakhage's Last Interview", by Marilynne S. Mason, Northern Lights Journal, 1984
Art goes on because artists have no choice in the matter, whether people are going to pay for it or not.· I can only say what art has been for me all these years, and I feel beaten in trying to defend it. An artist is someone who has no choice about making things and no choice as to what kind of making. People would say in the old days they were chosen - assuming there was something to choose them·.
I don't have any choice whether to make or not. The only thing I could choose is to try to fake it. When I'm not inspired. I can, if I want to be stupid or blasphemous enough, fake it - out of habit or because I think I should be doing it or because it's expected of me to do it. My integrity is that I resist faking it and work only when I have absolutely no choice in the matter·.
In the arts there are centuries of tradition. East and West, which make up a living, growing form. And at the roots and branches of that form there is always room for uniqueness, which means that one person is meeting out of his or her absolute being, the pressures of a given situation - and his or her unique extension is the only possibility of extension. But they are on that tree, and if they're involved in the arts, they feel the whole history of what has been available to them from the arts for thousands of years.· and they are the living extension of that. The whole tree is living.· you don't just have branches hanging out of the air, which is the mistake a lot of young people make. You feel back along, or read, or look at paintings of, or listen to music of that whole living tradition. And that's your trunk or your roots or branches. I guess the root end is what society calls the underground. Both ends of the tree are extending themselves or the tree is dying.
Twenty-four frames in a second is a rhythm. And in the mind also, where a growth or evolutionary process is reaching toward a picture, you almost have to think of it as a force field flow - what we call the life force itself.· as exact, and variable, as a plant coming up through the earth. And then what's done with that for recognition is to take slices of it, which are then put together into pictures.· and rhythm is the key to the first recognition of that process itself.
Rhythm comes first. You can't slice up that process to get an image. I mean rhythm really is the width of the slices, and that's how you get an image. Otherwise you don't get a recognizable image. If you slice it too thin, you can't follow the growth process. And if you slice it too fat, you have a series of pictures but you have no image. So rhythm is the intermediary in the process·. it is all in that context·
My work now primarily has to do with being able to exteriorize moving visual thought processes - that is, thinking that isn't locked into language, to words or symbols or other categorical imperatives of the left brain. There is a visual, unnameable, non-referential form of thinking, which, if it refers to anything - and I believe it does - has internal reference and is a reference to one's being. To achieve well-being, you have to have a way to converse with you own nervous system.· for the two hemispheres of the brain to converse with each other.
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© 2003 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center
