Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (Wide Angle Books) [Paperback]

David James (Author)

Book Description

Series: Wide Angle Books | Publication Date: July 13, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

From the Publisher

The art and legacy of a towering figure in the independent film movement --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press; 1 edition (July 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592132723
• ISBN-13: 978-1592132720
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,189,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From a Wide Angle, October 8, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (Wide Angle Books) (Paperback)

What is the nature of art? What is its bottom line? At first when sent this book I was skeptical, thinking it would be a hagiography of a genuinely difficult artist about whom there are only shades of grey. But editor David E. James anticipated me there, and in his beautifully delineated preface goes right to the heart of the matter, the precipitous decline of Brakhage's reputation, a drop nearly unparalleled in contemporary art. Was he, as Annette Michelson or P. Adams Sitney once claimed, the sort of genius artist for whom whole eras used to be named? A filmmaker who combined a sincerity and authenticity with a true avant-garde spirit and actual hardcore discoveries that forever changed the medium? Or was he what his latterday rep suggested, a driven, masculinist obsessive who was able to hide behind patriarchy the failures of an overdetermined use rule?

James makes it all sound so obvious, and yet he then comes around and suggests that even the haters might find something to cheer about with a new survey of Brakhage's voluminous output. (400 films, of which it was sometimes said that even Brakhage himself had only seen maybe three quarters of them.) Completists will sigh that James' compilation is too meager to do him justice, just as they balked at the recent Criterion release of 27 films, with far too many from the last 15 years of his life with those wild hand-painted strips of film. And not even women writing about Brakhage, but that's one of the issues in the first place, isn't it, and this book merely reflects that. Even so, Carolee Schneeeman and (especially) Abigail Child contribute two of the most cogent essays here. There are a few "poetic" pieces written by Brakhage's contemporaries, such as the essays by Bruce Baillie and Chuck Strand, that not even their mothers could love.

As James points out, there are few notable artists about whom so little biographical information is available. I vote for James himself to give it a go. Not only does his introduction represent and condense a whale's load of original research, but one of his own pieces, "Amateurs in an Industry Town" (on Warhol and Brakhage wrestling with Los Angeles both as metropolis and conceptual freedomland), is a brilliant and focussed article that sheds light not only on the supposed duality between the two filmmakers, but on their mutual interests and fellowship.

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent service!, January 4, 2007

By 

Stuart Liebman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (Wide Angle Books) (Paperback)

I received exactly the book I ordered. It came quickly, as advertised. I am very satisfied.