Moving Image
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_oK7yn4e2A
film of Manhattan's Third Avenue Elevated
Train.
Early Years
Brakhage spent the next few years living in
near poverty. While living in Denver,
Brakhage met Mary Jane Collom, whom he
married in late 1957. Brakhage tried to make
money out of his films, but had to take a job
making industrial shorts to support his family.
In 1959, Jane gave birth to the first of the five
children they would have together, an event
Brakhage recorded for his 1959 film
Window Water Baby Moving.
Window Water Baby Moving
(1959)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drSrvTtZ1k
A record of the Jane Brakhage’s pregnancy
and the birth of their child.
The 1960s and Beginning of
Recognition
When Brakhage's early films had been exhibited in
the 1950s, they had often been met with derision,
but in the early 1960s Brakhage began to receive
recognition in exhibitions and film publications,
including Film Culture, which awarded several of his
films, including , The Dead in 1962. The award
statement, written by Jonas Mekas, a critic who
would later become an influential experimental
filmmaker in his own right, cited Brakhage for
bringing to cinema "an intelligence and subtlety that
is usually the province of the older arts.“
From 1961 to 1964, Brakhage worked on a series of
5 films known as the Dog Star Man cycle.
Dog Star Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTGdGgQtZic
A woodsman attempts to climb a mountain. He struggles with a dead
white tree, throws it down and chops at it.
All of the techniques which Brakhage had been developing to this time
were brought into play for The Art of Vision. Rapid cutting, multiple
superimposition, out-of-focus, color filters, distorted lenses, painting on
film, cutting into the frame, the use of zoom, rapid camera movement,
the use of negative footage and the mixing of color and black and white:
‘He has completely rejected continuity of space or time: that is, real
spatial dimension does not exist in his films, and events do not follow
each other with relation to any time sequence. There is no "base" that
one can approach his work from. His films are dreams, without the
Freudian symbols that made earlier attempts in this direction more
immediately understandable; they are visions, but with too many
unrecognizable objects to be directly related to one's daily experience’.
Fred Camper
1960’s
The Brakhages moved to , Colorado in 1964, though Brakhage
continued to make regular visits to New York. During one of
those visits, the 16mm film equipment he had been using was
stolen. Brakhage couldn't afford to replace it, instead opting to
buy cheaper 8mm film equipment. He soon began working in the
format, producing a 30-part cycle of 8mm films known as the
Songs from 1964 to 1969. The Songs include one of Brakhage's
most acclaimed films, 23rd Psalm Branch, a response to the
Vietnam War and its presentation in the mass media.
Brakhage began teaching film history and aesthetics at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969, commuting from
his home in Colorado.
1970s and 1980s
Brakhage explored further approaches to filmmaking in the 1970s. In 1971, he
completed a set of three films inspired by public institutions in the city of
Pittsburgh. These three films--Eyes, about the city police, Deus Ex, filmed in a
hospital, and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, depicting autopsy--are
collectively known as "The Pittsburgh Trilogy."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1zVmIacXy4
In 1974, Brakhage made the feature-length Text of Light, consisting entirely of
images of light refracted in a glass ashtray.
In 1979, he experimented with Polavision, a format marketed by Polaroid,
making about five 2 1/2 minute films. The whereabouts of these films are now
unknown. He continued his visual explorations of landscape and the nature of
light and thought process, and through the late 70's and early 80's produced
filmic equivalents of what he termed "moving visual thinking" in several series of
photographic abstractions known as the Roman, Arabic, and Egyptian series.
In 1979, Brakhage began teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
In the late 1980s, Brakhage returned to making sound films, with the four-part
cycle, and also completed the hand-painted "Dante Quartet.“
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az13qB_AUIo
1990’s Onwards
Brakhage remained extremely productive through the last two
decades of his life, sometimes working in collaboration with other
filmmakers, including his University of Colorado colleague
Phil Solomon. Several more sound films were completed,
including "Passage Through: A Ritual," edited to the music of
Philip Corner, and "Christ Mass Sex Dance" and "Ellipsis No. 5,"
both with music by James Tenney. He also produced the major
meditations on childhood, adolescence, aging and mortality
collectively known as the "Vancouver Island Quartet," as well as
numerous hand-painted works.
Brakhage was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1996, and died
in 2003, aged 70. The last footage Brakhage shot has been
made available under the title Work In Progress. At the time of
his death, Brakhage was also working on the Chinese Series,
made by scratching directly on to film.
Summing up – Formal
Characteristics
Other filmmakers such as Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos,
Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Curtis Harrington and Sidney Peterson
created similar ‘Personal Films’. Significantly, many of these filmmakers
were the first students from the pioneering university film programs
established in Los Angeles and New York.
In 1946, Frank Stauffacher started the "Art in Cinema" series of
experimental films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
They set up "alternative film programs" at Black Mountain College and the
San Francisco Art Institute.
Post WWII American experimental film can be defined in its influence
from European Modernism, specifically abstraction and surrealism.
Films fragmented time and space and had a dream-like feel
Filmmakers attempted to represent personal reflections and inner vision
in a new way through experimenting with narrative and often tactile
techniques (Superimposition, Colour, Editing, scratching and painting on
film).
Filmmakers often had an interest with the body, sexuality, Ritual,
metaphysics, mortality.