So apparently, there was this guy named Stan Brakhage who made films. Really intense films. This great thing called the Criterion Collection put out this DVD which is anthology of a lot of Brakhage's work. I watched most of it last night. Whoa.

I missed the boat on this. Amazing stuff. Some can get kind of crap and boring, but most are amazing. Whoa.

PRF?

Not crap at all. The film he made of his wife delivering their baby is amazing. It can be found on the interwebby.

I haven't seen any of his films, but I want to after starting to listen to these. Houseboat kindly posted them in the "little details..." thread, which I would have missed had Sunlore not recommended them again.

I have only got as far as the fifth broadcast (they're just 30 minutes long each), which floored me. Perhaps it was partly the mood I was in, but I have not been moved to tears by art in a long time. I cannot praise Brakhage's ability to find lost treasures and weave them in with moving anecdote and erudition.

On those alone, NOT CRAP. But I must see his films.

The movies with sound that I saw were...weird.

His stuff is taxing but also a bit purifying, after a fashion, I daresay.

NOT CRAP.

I accidentally voted Crap, as I thought the answers pertained to asking whether I'd want to put Brakhage's work on or off. Darn.

Not Crap.

The aforementioned Criterion collection* By Brakhage is the last word in Stan Brakhage material currently available. He was apparently at great pains to present his films as originally intended and thought earlier VHS transfers did violence to them. The DVDs look absolutely fantastic and are highly recommended.

Each frame was painstakingly constructed by hand and a day’s work might have yielded just a few seconds of film - something like his masterpiece Dog Star Man probably took years to assemble. I also really like Mothlight where each frame is comprised of plants, flowers or elements of moth wings stuck to clear tape:



(If you enjoy Stan Brakhage you might like to look into the work of Len Lye, an earlier pioneer of experimental film.)

*sparky - I'm happy to lend or clone this for you if you want to check it out.

Not crap, but man oh man, was that artiste ever a blowhard. I'll see if I can dig up some interview text or commentary he had on his own work, or something or other, I forget what it was that really ate at me....

Great stuff, though--R.I.P. dude

I like his early stuff, too--what's the one where he's scratched out the eyes of some guy who is walking up some stairs or whatever--way different from the intense painted single-frame stuff, but he's still scratching at every frame . . . looks really cool.

difficult but not crap. high waffle factor.

Bubber wrote:Not crap, but man oh man, was that artiste ever a blowhard. I'll see if I can dig up some interview text or commentary he had on his own work, or something or other, I forget what it was that really ate at me....

Bullshit.

That interiew that used to be on YouTube was awesome.
Plus, his radio series proves him to be about as far from 'blowhard' as is humanly possible.

I've only had the oppurtunity to see a wrongly encoded VHS of his work in black and white, and what's available on the internet. I'm holding out on Dog Man Star one of these days.

Hero. What beauty. What strangeness.

Not even a shred of crap can be associated with ol' Brakhage. He was, from what I gather, one of the finer specimens of the human race.

Isn't it a frame from Brakhage that's the cover of EVOL?

**Nope, just checked. It's Richard Kern.