Overview
Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker is a collection of essays, photographs, personal statements and reminiscences about the celebrate filmmaker, who died in 2003. The producer of some four hundred films, he is widely recognized as one of the great artists of the medium. His innovations in fast cutting, hand-held camerawork, and multiple superimpositions together created an unprecedentedly rich texture of images that provided the vocabulary for the explosion of independent filmmaking in the 1960s. His use of his own life and family as his subject matter and then later, his turn to hand-painted abstract films, inspired generations of filmmakers who refused the rewards of the mainstream film industry and instead tried to make cinema an artform directed by its own integrity and the vision of human emancipation. The essays in this book, by historians and filmmakers and other artists, describe Brakhage's contributions to the rich history of filmmaking in the world.
Full Product Details
Author: David James
Publisher: Temple University Press,U.S.
Imprint: Temple University Press,U.S.
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.472kg
ISBN: 9781592132713
ISBN 10: 1592132715
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 13 July 2005
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Awaiting stock
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Reviews
The scant attention given Stan Brakhage's one-man reinvention of motion pictures is a scandal of academic cinema studies. This generous collection of essays and appreciations, contributed by a wide variety of poets, critics, scholars, and fellow filmmakers, is most illuminating-it beams a welcome light on the terra incognita of Brakhage's accomplishment. -J. Hoberman, Village Voice film critic Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker contains arguments and perspectives on Brakhage's work I've not seen before. The combination of academic perspectives and those of filmmakers is an especially original and appropriate way to treat Brakhage, who always hoped his films would inspire new ways of seeing and making, and is a major strength of this fine book, which offers a variety of new and interesting ways of thinking about Brakhage's films. -Fred Camper, independent film scholar To sing in praise of Stan Brakhage is to sing in praise of cinema-daring us to see as we have never seen before. These wonderfully diverse essays take the measure of one of cinema's great visionaries. -Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary and editor, Maya Deren and the American Avant Garde
An anthology praising perhaps the best-known and most widely-celebrated American avant-garde filmmaker. Communications Booknotes Quarterly A pity that Brakhage did not live to see the book, because the essayists listed in the table of contents read like a Who's Who of the avant-garde. All these folks came to praise Brakhage, not to bury him.Contemporary film student need to know that such an abstract visual talent as Brakhage could succeed in the US, and therein lies the book's value. Recommended. Choice
Author Information
David E. James is Professor in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. He is the editor of The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in Los Angeles (Temple) and author of The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Contributors: Paul Arthur, Montclair State University; Bruce Baillie; Abigail Child; Edward Dorn; Craig Dworkin; R. Bruce Elder; Nicky Hamlyn, Kent Institute of Art and Design; Jonas Mekas; Tyrus Miller, University of California, Santa Cruz; Carolee Schneemann; P. Adams Sitney, Princeton University; Phil Solomon, University of Colorado, Boulder; Chick Strand; James Tenney, California Institute of the Arts; Willie Varela, University of Texas at El Paso; and the editor.
