Overview

Since the late 1950s Stan Brakhage has been in the forefront of independent filmmaking. His body of work - some seventy hours - is one of the largest of any filmmaker in the history of cinema, and one of the most diverse. Probably the most widely quoted experimental filmmaker in history, his films typify the independent cinema. Until now, despite well-deserved acclaim, there has been no comprehensive study of Brakhage's oeuvre. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition fills this void. R. Bruce Elder delineates the aesthetic parallels between Brakhage's films and a broad spectrum of American art from the 1920s through the 1960s. This book is certain to stir the passions of those interested in artistic critique and interpretation in its broadest terms.

Full Product Details

Author:   R. Bruce Elder
Publisher:   Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint:   Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   1.000kg
ISBN:  

9781554582013

ISBN 10:   1554582016
Pages:   583
Publication Date:   30 August 2011
Audience:   General/trade ,  Adult education ,  College/higher education ,  General ,  Further / Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Table of Contents for The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson by R. Bruce Elder With Gratitude Acknowledgments Preface From the Givenness of Nature to the Encumbered Modern Body The Signifying Body The Two Bodies in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Body Observed Externally and the Body Experienced from Within The Modern Bodyâs Unbearable Burden of Being The Harmony of Spirit and Body The Primacy of the Subject Body and the Recessiveness of the Subject Body Chapter 1. Four for America: Williams, Pound, Stein, Brakhage Styles of English Metre Meaning and Personal Being: Pound and Brakhage The Seachange: Or, How Pound Came âTo Break the Pentameterâ Bergson, Hulme, Pound, and Brakhage on the Body and Energy Experience as Energy: A Pattern for Thinking First-Person Singular: Bergson, Hulme, and Brakhage on the Primacy of Individuality Between Self and World: The Image in Hulme, Williams, Brakhage Writing = Composing Soundâs Energies, Filmmaking = Composing Lightâs Energies: Gertrude Stein and Stan Brakhageâs Conceptions of Their Media Digressive Interpolation: The Persistence of Emersonâs Vision in Steinâs Writing and Brakhageâs Filmmaking Out of Stein: A Theory of Meaning for Stan Brakhageâs Films The Paradox of a Perlocutionary Semantics: Brakhage and Stein on Artistic Meaning The Romanticism of Brakhageâs Conception of Meaning Chapter 2. The Conception of the Body in Open Form Poetics and Its Influence on Stan Brakhageâs Filmmaking H. Lawrence and the Poetics of Energy Two Crucial Influences on Embodied Poetics: A.N. Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty A.N. Whiteheadâs Project: Reconciling Permanence and Flux Olsonâs Energetics of Embodied Existence Michael McClureâs Poetics: The Body Is an Organism. The Universe Is an Organism. A Poem Embodies an Aspect of the Universeâs Evolving Form Allen Ginsberg: The Breath, the Voice, and the Poem Action Painting as Performance Glossary Notes Selected Bibliography Stan Brakhage Filmography Index

Reviews

Elder evidences a brilliant command of Brakhage s immense filmography and a lifetime s engagement with the poets he discusses....In every reading there are traces of the lessons Brakhage s cinema can offer to open-minded an open-eyed artists. In fact, The films of Stan Brakhage is less an academic study than the enthusiastic and fully committed response of one filmmaker to another and to the modernist tradition they both share. --P. Adams Sitney, Princeton University, author of Visionary Films and Modernist Montage

Elder evidences a brilliant command of Brakhage s immense filmography and a lifetime s engagement with the poets he discusses....In every reading there are traces of the lessons Brakhage s cinema can offer to open-minded an open-eyed artists. In fact, The films of Stan Brakhage is less an academic study than the enthusiastic and fully committed response of one filmmaker to another and to the modernist tradition they both share. - P. Adams Sitney, Princeton University, author of Visionary Films and Modernist Montage

This challenging and important work demands the attention of film historians, scholars, critics, theoreticians, and media and culture commentators. In addition to a select bibliography, there is a glossary, a filmography, and 58 pages of notes. -- M. Wayne Cunningham -- Canadian Book Review Annual In R. Bruce Elder's The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson, the link between Brakhage and the great poetic voices of the 20th century is persuasively established....Elder's greatest accomplishment in this book is his ability to interweave varying disciplines so that the reader becomes acutely aware of the points of intersection between media. Despite its wide-ranging topic, The Films of Stan Brakhage is meticulously researched, remarkably lucid, and provides a compelling argument for Brakhage's place alongside these great thinkers of the 20th century. -- Christopher Luna -- Rain Taxi Elder evidences a brilliant command of Brakhage's immense filmography and a lifetime's engagement with the poets he discusses....In every reading there are traces of the lessons Brakhage's cinema can offer to open-minded an open-eyed artists. In fact, The films of Stan Brakhage is less an academic study than the enthusiastic and fully committed response of one filmmaker to another and to the modernist tradition they both share. -- P. Adams Sitney, Princeton University, author ofVisionary Films and Modernist Montage

Author Information

R. Bruce Elder is an award-winning filmmaker and teaches media at Ryerson University. His book Harmony & Dissent (WLU Press, 2008) received the prestigious Robert Motherwell Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Rudolf Kuenzli described DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (WLU Press, 2013) as """"that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light.

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