Stan Brakhage

"Homage to Stan Brakhage - Part One"
When: 7pm Wednesday April 2 2003
Where: HCC Campus Theater

"Homage to Stan Brakhage - Part Two"
When: 5pm Saturday April 5 2003
Where: HCC Ybor Room

He made more than 350 films in his 50 years of filmmaking, yet many people who count themselves among "film bufs" who crowd the multiplexes on Saturday nights have never heard of Stan Brakhage.

Stan Brakhage
Photo by Ken Abbott
University of Colorado at Boulder

Brakhage challenged the senses of his audience with confusing, disarming, sometimes disturbing scenes accompanied by discordant music. He hand painted and scratched individual frames of his films. Once he filmed his dog's decomposing body as a tribute.

Scorning commercial avenues for his films, Brakhage subsisted on grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. He was a professor of film at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He moved to Victoria, British Columnbia, in 2002.

Brakhage attended but dropped out of Dartmouth College. He worked with Joseph Cornell, a surrealist and an influence on many avant-garde filmmakers, in New York City. With Cornell, he made "The Wonder Ring" (1955), about the last runs of the New York's Third Avenue elevated train. For two days, Brakhage rode the train, shooting footage of whatever interested him and then editing it into a moody, sensual, and exhilarating bit of cinema.

In 1964, he made "Dog Star Man", which some consider his best film. It earned a permanent spot on the Library of Congress National Film Registry. The film uses symbolic images of mountain climbing, tree cutting to show the loss of grandeur and myth.

Brakhage pioneered cinemagrphic effects now considered mainstays, such as out of focus scenes that suddenly pop into focus. His work is required study in most film schools.

"When people turn on their TV and go to the movies, they're seeing Brakhage without even knowing it," said Paul Roth, an assistant curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, told the Washington Post.

So maybe the popcorn-smaking "film bufs" do know Brakhage, after all.