Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990
    Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990
    Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990
    Ebook635 pages8 hours

    Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990

    By Jerry White

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This is a collection of writings by the giant of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage, that shows him in a completely new light, as part of world cinema. For the duration of the 1980s, Brakhage contributed to the Boulder literary magazine Rolling Stock, mostly publishing reports from the Telluride Film Festival. These reports show that Brakhage was keenly interested in world cinema, anxious to meet and dialogue with filmmakers of many different stripes.

    The book also contains substantial discussion of Brakhage's work in light of the filmmakers he encountered at Telluride and discussed in Rolling Stock. Long chapters are given over to Soviet filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Larissa Shepitko, and Sergei Parajanov, as well as the German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Brakhage was a keen viewer of these filmmakers and their contemporaries, both at Telluride and in his role as teacher at the University of Colorado, and Stan Brakhage and Rolling Stock attempts to place his work alongside theirs and thus reclaim him for world cinema.

    The book's appendices reprint letters Brakhage wrote to Stella Pence (Telluride's co-founder and managing director), as well as summaries of his work for Telluride and a brace of difficult-to-find reviews.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateApr 19, 2018
    ISBN9781771123068
    Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990
    Author

    Jerry White

    Jerry White is an activist entrepreneur known for leading high-impact campaigns, three of which led to international treaties: the Mine Ban Treaty; the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the Cluster Munitions Ban. White shares in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. As co-founder of Landmine Survivors Network, he worked with Diana, Princess of Wales, to help thousands of war victims find peer support and job training. White served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State to launch the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, introducing advanced decision analytics to predict the outcomes of complex negotiations. He studied religion at Brown and theology at Cambridge University, with honorary degrees from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Glasgow Caledonia University. White is a Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia.

    Read more from Jerry White

    Related to Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990

    Titles in the series (21)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Performing Arts For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990 - Jerry White

      Film and Media Studies Series

      Film studies is the critical exploration of cinematic texts as art and entertainment, as well as the industries that produce them and the audiences that consume them. Although a medium barely a hundred years old, film has been and continues to be transformed through the emergence of new media forms. Media studies, an interdisciplinary field, considers the nature and effects of mass media upon individuals and society, and analyzes media content and representations. Despite changing modes of consumption—especially the proliferation of individuated viewing technologies—film has retained its cultural dominance into the twenty-first century, and it is this transformative moment that the Wilfrid Laurier University Press Film and Media Studies Series addresses.

      This Series includes topics such as identity, gender, sexuality, class, race, visuality, space, music, new media, aesthetics, genre, youth culture, popular culture, consumer culture, regional/national cinemas, film policy, film theory, and film history.

      Wilfrid Laurier University Press invites submissions. For further information, please contact the Series editors, all of whom are in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University:

      Dr. Philippa Gates

      pgates@wlu.ca

      Dr. Russell Kilbourn

      rkilbourn@wlu.ca

      Dr. Ute Lischke

      ulischke@wlu.ca

      Department of English and Film Studies

      Wilfrid Laurier University

      75 University Avenue West

      Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5

      Canada

      Phone 519-884-0710

      Fax 519-884-8307

      This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      White, Jerry, 1971–, author

      Stan Brakhage in Rolling stock, 1980–1990 / Jerry White.

      (Film and media studies series)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-77112-303-7 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-77112-305-1 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-77112-306-8 (EPUB)

      1. Brakhage, Stan. 2. Motion pictures—History. I. Title. II. Title: Rolling stock. III. Series: Film and media studies series

      PN1998.3.B74W55 2017          791.4302’33092          C2017-901936-8

           C2017-901937-6

      Front-cover images: photo of Stan Brakhage in profile © 1979 Ingrid Lundahl; background photo by Kathryn Bernheimer as it appeared in the Daily Camera (Boulder, CO). Cover and text design by Lara Minja, Lime Design Inc.

      © 2018 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

      www.wlupress.wlu.ca

      This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.

      Printed in Canada

      Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

      Do Bhob Quinn, an Brakhage Gaelach

              & Pour Martha Crago, ma cousine coloradienne

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      1

      A Conservative Avant-Garde

      Brakhage, Tarkovsky, and Syberberg

      Stan Brakhage Texts

      Brakhage Text 1

      Closely Watched Blurs

      Brakhage Text 2

      Brakhage at the Ninth Telluride

      Brakhage Text 3

      Telluride Gold Brakhage Meets Tarkovsky

      Brakhage Text 3.1

      Short Takes on Telluride Straight European vs. New American

      Critical Interlude

      Notes on the Films Brakhage Showed to Tarkovsky, 1983

      Stan Brakhage Texts

      Brakhage Text 4

      Telluride Zinc

      Brakhage Text 4.1

      Mailer Madness, Torn Macho

      Brakhage Text 4.2

      Losey and Leigh

      Brakhage Text 5

      Telluride Takes, Brakhage Talks

      Brakhage Text 6

      Brakhage Observes Telluride the 13th

      Brakhage Text 7

      The Gold, the Bad, & the Usual Stan Brakhage Reviews the 15th Telluride Film Festival

      2

      A Certain Kind of Soviet

      Brakhage, Parajanov, and Shepitko

      Conclusion

      Epilogue

      Pordenone, 2015

      Appendix A

      Brakhage’s First Appearance in Rolling Stock: The Swiftly Perceived Blur: From I . . . . Sleeping (Being a Dream Journal and Parenthetical Explication)

      Appendix B

      Brakhage’s Final Appearance in Rolling Stock: International Cinema: The 12th Denver

      Appendix C

      Blessings: Letters from Stan Brakhage

      Appendix D

      B. Ruby Rich: "Hitler: A Film from Germany: Is this a fascist film or an exposé of fascist filmmaking?"

      A Stan Brakhage / Telluride Filmography

      A Stan Brakhage / Rolling Stock Bibliography

      Works Cited

      Index

      Acknowledgements

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IN ACADEMIC WORKS are famously long-winded and self-indulgent. Aficionados of the genre will find that what follows sets a new high-water mark as far as that goes.

      Even by the usual standards for such things, this book has been an insanely long road. In a way, I started it at the age of 17, when my father (also called Jerry White), who recently retired as an internationally respected medical physicist but was a habitué of the Penn State Film Society in his university days, drove me up I-25 to see a Stan Brakhage program at the Denver International Film Festival. That summer, he took me on the much longer drive to the Telluride Film Festival. We almost didn’t make it; at one point I was pushing our Toyota Land Cruiser backwards down the hiking-trail-like Imogene Pass as he tried to pop the clutch. We did make it, though, and between the years 1989 and 2011, we did not fail even once to attend the event together. This madness, as with so many things, was his doing.

      All through university, my Philadelphia days, and graduate school, Bill and Stella Pence provided me with a unique summer job that I was uniquely ill suited for: one part light construction, one part light accounting. Tom Luddy showed me what an international man of mystery might look like if transposed to the milieu of filmmaking. The three of them also staged the best annual seminar in world cinema a guy could ask for. For all of that I am grateful. The fact that the last time I was in Telluride some people were still calling me Felix or asking me where my kids were is a testament to the faith in young people that Jim Bedford and Kate Sibley are famous for, and from which I have benefited massively. Lynn Gershmann showed me what being a high school teacher was all about, and our years working together on the festival’s City Lights program stand as the pedagogical collaboration that I am proudest of.

      Between 1998 and 2013, we never failed to send an Alberta contingent (and, briefly, a Nova Scotia contingent) to Telluride’s student symposium, presided over by the veteran critic Howie Movshovitz and the true doyenne of American film scholarship Linda Williams. A bunch of these Albertans wound up on the festival staff, prompting one member of Telluride’s senior management to worry extravagantly about the royalist plot I seemed to be hatching. National security considerations prevent me from identifying the worrier in question, but he knows who he is, and I thank him for looking after our people so well. These contingents were basically the corps of my most beloved students, literally my pride and joy as an academic, and every Labor Day (note spelling!), I spare a thought for La Marmotte, and wonder who is going to be picking up what part of the tab at the Alberta Supper.

      At this point, it will likely not surprise to read that my wife refers to the years I worked for Telluride as my cult phase. I do not disagree, but from what I know of being in a cult, I feel like I did pretty well. I’ll thus end the cult part of the proceedings by acknowledging the lifelong friendships I made there, friendships that have basically taken the place of old college friends in my middle-aged life (I’m not in touch with anyone I knew in university). Shine Bedford-Pritchard, Sandy Groom, Ellie Lee, Jeff Middents, Jason Silverman, and Rani Singh: I wish we talked more often, and it’s never less than terrific when our paths do cross. Garret Savage has made me feel like an east-coaster again, in a way that only a much-beloved fellow westerner could.

      Okay, keeping it professional, now. Since coming to Dalhousie in 2011, I have been supported by the Canada Research Chairs program, and I am very happy to acknowledge their key role in this work. This book was hatched in its earliest form by an article in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies’ special issue on Stan Brakhage, 14.1 (spring 2005); thanks to William Wees (McGill University) for publishing that. It was also incubated in the form of a class on Brakhage, Tarkovsky, and Syberberg that I taught at the University of Alberta in fall 2005, and I thank Bill Beard and Garrett Epp for allowing what must have seemed like a pretty goofy offering.

      On the archival front, Robert Haller, who I consider the Dean of Brak-hage scholarship, was most welcoming when I began this project with a trip to the Anthology Film Archives in 2013. He taught me a lot in those few days and got me off on the right foot. The University of Colorado’s Brad Arnold is the keeper of the Brakhage papers, and he knows the collection unbelievably well; he is the model of a scholarly archivist. He also put me in touch with Jane Wodening, to whom I am grateful for sharing insights and memories. It was a trip to the CU Brakhage papers that marked the end of my research work on this book, and it was a great note to go out on. Sol Nagler (NSCAD University) provided a 16mm projector, a nice screening space, and some good fellowship for watching Untitled No. 6.

      Jennifer Dunbar Dorn and Marilyn Brakhage provided permission to reprint these Rolling Stock pieces, and I am grateful. Both were very supportive in some pretty extended correspondence, and Dunbar Dorn really came through in the clutch in terms of providing back issues of the magazine. I’m also grateful to Stella Pence for permission to reprint Brakhage’s letters to her that were first published in the Telluride Watch’s special supplement, and to B. Ruby Rich for permission to reprint her L.A. Reader review of Hitler: A Film from Germany.

      At WLUP, Lisa Quinn was very supportive early on and super-determined (on more than one front) later on; Siobhan McMenemy brought this boat into port. Many thanks indeed to both. Thanks also to the anonymous readers. I took all of the reports I read to heart, and I hope one and all find that I did my very best to take what they said seriously.

      Although neither one remembers it now, both Sasha and Bubba watched experimental films with me, and their pre- or semi-verbal responses to them were utterly Brakhagian. As with everything in my life, they opened my eyes in ways I couldn’t have possibly imagined. And Sara Daniels, as always, deserves the biggest thanks of all.

      Introduction

      My big problem has been, all these years, that no one has recognized that I (and all my contemporaries) are working in a lineal tradition of Méliès, Griffith, Dreyer, Eisenstein, and all of the other classically accepted film makers. Why not? Why are they unable to recognize that? . . . Why did we all have to go through that terrible embarrassment of the late ’60s when we were presented to the world as though we sprang full-blown, completely new, from an LSD dream?

      —Stan Brakhage, Stan and Jane, Talking (interview with Hollis Frampton), 76

      Stan Brakhage is the most inclusive of filmmakers. The almost omnivorous impulse behind his choices of subjects and styles makes it difficult to characterize his work in particularizing terms.

      —Fred Camper, Brakhage’s Contradictions, 69

      LIKE SO MANY OF HIS COLLEAGUES in American avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage seems to resist being placed in an international context. The core group of 1960s and ’70s experimental filmmakers (variably known as the New American Cinema, Underground Film, etc.)¹ may have included a few Austrians and Canadians among their number (Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka; Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland), but sustained international comparisons have been the exception rather than the rule when discussing this part of film history. For the most part, there has been something almost inescapably American about the New American Cinema. David James’s widely influential 1989 book Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties did a lot to return the political complexity of this material to the discussion, but as its title indicates, it focus was squarely on American filmmakers. Nothing wrong with that, of course: James sets an area of study and sticks to it, all quite fine. But I do wonder why so few scholars of James’s calibre haven’t opted to set a more explicitly global area of study. Another aspect of the critical work on experimental cinema that is striking is the degree to which it has remained averse to comparisons with narrative cinema. It is not unusual, particularly in the work of P. Adams Sitney (who emerged in the late 1960s as the foremost critic and historian of the movement), to find discussions of the giants of classical European cinema, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, or Robert Bresson, and even of work by Hollywood filmmakers like Buster Keaton. But I know of nearly no critical discourse that engages Stan Brakhage alongside a narrative filmmaker in the same manner that Irish literary critics would write about Seamus Heaney and John Banville together, or how feminist literary critics might consider Adrienne Rich and Marguerite Duras together. Even David James’s later anthology, Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (2005), largely confines its discussion of Brakhage to placing him, more so even than Allegories of Cinema, within the world of American experimental filmmaking.

      What I long for, really, is something similar to what Lucy Fischer does in her 1988 book Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema. That book reads classics of feminist counter-cinema (such as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 film Riddles of the Sphinx) alongside Hollywood films (such as, in that case, Orson Welles’s 1947 The Lady from Shanghai). She introduces her overall task by saying, I am using the comparative framework as a rhetorical device to emphasize how feminist work must counter the artifacts of the dominant culture (13). What I to set out to do through this book is use this kind of comparative framework, not so much as a rhetorical device but as a means to demonstrate how avant-garde work must be present in discussions of world cinema by way of countering the dominance of narrative cinema in our very notion of the concept of world cinema.

      Plenty of path-breaking work on American avant-garde cinema has been done by scholars working more recently, but much of it seems to fall into the same basic trap that had been sprung by the previous generations. Robin Blaetz’s 2007 anthology Women’s Experimental Cinema, which has many useful articles by and about leading figures of the new generation, is a good example; so is Scott MacDonald’s prolific writing about experimental cinema, writing that is as important to our present understanding as Sitney’s was in the 1970s and James’s was in the late 1980s. I greatly admire the Blaetz anthology, as well as MacDonald’s writing; they do what they do exceptionally well. I just wonder why it is, more than fifty years after the leading filmmakers started working, this sometimes seems like the only thing that can be done. There are exceptions, for sure. MacDonald’s 2009 book Adventure of Perception: Cinema as Exploration features an interview with the American experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton, where he talks about how he has been influenced by the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami in much the same way that I will argue Brakhage felt a kinship with the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Hutton told MacDonald: "Having seen the tremendous range of Kiarostami’s narrative films, and then seeing him distill his work into a shot of the moon reflecting in the water, suggests to me that after being involved in the big theater of cinema in a more traditional way, he’s becoming aware of the quietude, the subtlety, the nuance of understatement; and by dedicating Five to Ozu, he references another who worked in a different form of cinematic time" (228). This reference to a filmmaker, who, in the 1990s and 2000s enjoyed a North American and Western European acclaim that was very much like that of Tarkovsky’s in the 1970s and ’80s (such a poet! and from such an oppressive country!), is notable for a few reasons. One is its exceptional quality; that is just not the context in which MacDonald tends to place the American experimentalists he writes about (although perhaps inspired by Hutton, a few pages later he talks about Sharon Lockhart’s single-shot film Nō as comparable to the last sequence in Kiarostami’s Five). Again, nothing wrong with that—not all work has to be comparative. But it is interesting to observe that it is Hutton that brings MacDonald to Kiarostami, so to speak; except for sustained engagement with Peter Watkins, there’s very little in MacDonald’s voluminous (and, I hasten to repeat, invaluable) writing about the avant-garde to suggest that he would tend to move toward comparisons with innovative narrative filmmakers, with parts of what we have come to call world cinema (a term I will unpack in due course).

      Sitney has also shown scholarly interest in other kinds of filmmaking. He has written widely on Pasolini; his 1990 Modernist Montage has long chapters on the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, and Soviet silent cinema, in addition to discussions of surrealist cinema and the American visionary tradition. Indeed, his pathbreaking book Visionary Film: The American Avant Garde 1943–2000, first published in 1974, opens with a discussion of how the films of Maya Deren connect with the European cine-surrealism embodied by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, especially their 1928 film Un chien andalou. That book also has a chapter called The Graphic Cinema: European Perspectives, although, as with that discussion of surrealism, the focus there is on work that is easily considered experimental, such as Fernand Léger or Peter Kubelka, rather than on more borderline cases such as Straub-Huillet. More recently, Sitney’s 2015 book The Cinema of Poetry has a section on narrative cinema in Europe that includes a chapter on the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky that mentions Brakhage a few times (including the filmmakers’ encounter at Telluride as recounted in Rolling Stock), and goes so far as to say, In its commitment to the model of poetic observation, Tarkovsky’s theoretical position occupies a position between the narrative poetry expounded by Pasolini and Stan Brakhage’s polemics for a cinema of visionary poetry (99). But while Sitney has an admirably wide set of cinematic interests, he’s actually quite rarely inclined to write in this manner. There are relatively few cases where he discusses experimental filmmakers alongside someone like Tarkovsky, that is to say, alongside a European filmmaker widely considered to be part of Art Cinema. The aforementioned Tarkovsky chapter in The Cinema of Poetry discusses Brakhage either in passing or tentatively, even though that book’s chapter on Brakhage (which doesn’t mention Tarkovsky at all) is its longest. For instance, drawing on the Rolling Stock piece Telluride Gold: Brakhage Meets Tarkovsky, Sitney argues in his chapter on Tarkovsky that the Russian filmmaker distances his work from ‘poetic cinema’ as he understands it to be commonly used, in part because of his dislike for Brakhage’s films (69). Modernist Montage, like The Cinema of Poetry, has essays on European filmmakers and essays on experimental filmmakers, but little explicit consideration of these parts of world cinema together. Just as the experimental cinema of North America seemed to exist behind a kind of avant-garde Iron Curtain, it has too often seemed to me that a kind of firewall exists between narrative and non-narrative filmmaking, one that few critics and historians have felt like they can jump through.

      There were, in the 1970s, some attempts to break out of this sense of aesthetic isolationism, but I do not sense that the transformations in critical perspective that leftist critics like Peter Wollen or Constance Penley and Janet Bergstrom seemed to be hoping for have taken hold in a widespread way. This particular ball got rolling in 1975, with the publication of Wollen’s essay The Two Avant-Gardes in the pages of Studio International. He opened that essay on this split tradition by saying, The first can be identified loosely with the Co-op movement. The second would include film-makers such as Godard, Straub and Huillet, Hanoun, Jansco. . . . At the extreme, each would tend to deny the others the status of avant-garde at all (Readings and Writings, 92). I would submit that this is no longer an extreme; a slightly softer version of this mutual denial has emerged as a kind of critical consensus, with those who write about American experimental film rarely coming anywhere close to Godard or Straub-Huillet, and those writing about Godard never once mentioning Brakhage (a name that does not appear in any one of the three Godard biographies—Colin MacCabe’s and Richard Brody’s in English, Antoine de Baecque’s in French). One noteable exception to this is Richard I. Suchenski’s 2016 book Projections of Memory, which begins with a citation of Brakhage’s introduction of Tarkovsky at the 1983 Telluride Film Festival and whose chapter devoted to Godard features some very enlightening comparisons with Brakhage’s work. Overall, Suchenski argues, For far too long, film history has maintained a false opposition between Brakhage’s exteriorization of subjectivity and the ‘Brechtian’ artifice of Godard. . . . Yet with the benefit of hindsight, it becomes increasingly clear that Godard and Brakhage—notwithstanding their many important ideological, formal, and contextual differences—are two poles of a larger mid-century modernist project that challenged the naive assumptions that the film screen is a direct window onto the world, focusing instead on the structure of perception (164).² On one level, I want simpy to say, Amen, brother! and leave it at that. At a more meta-historical level, though, I take this kind of discussion as a sign that critics and historians are starting to take a broader view of film aesthetics, and to wrestle fully with the diversity of the cinema, rather than unconsicously reinforcing a split based on a mutual indifference—an injustice to our understanding of both narrative and non-narrative modes.

      Lauren Rabinovitz argues that creation of these two solitudies, these two perspectives determined to ignore one another despite their co-existence within the city-state of the avant-garde, was the purpose of Wollen’s article all along. She writes, Wollen’s essay creates a simplistic bifurcation between North American and European cinemas so as to make the study of Modernist/North American cinema appear irrelevant to those interested in relations between politics and art, art and ideology, ideology and practice (18). Rabinovitz was writing in her book Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943–71. As a study of three important filmmakers (Maya Deren, Joyce Wieland, and Shirley Clarke), and of gender politics in the North American avant-garde, this book is centrally important. But Rabinovitz’s focus on North America to the exclusion of all other filmmaking contexts looks as blinkered as anything in Wollen’s writing. If anything, I think that denunciations of Wollen’s formulations make it seem like European cinema is basically irrelevant for those interested in formal innovation and ideological tensions. The only sustained engagement here with European filmmakers comes when she says, When specific examples of women’s independent cinema have been interpreted in this light, the dominant objects for discussion have been American and Western European feminist films made during the last two decades (30–31). She then rattles off films by Marguerite Duras, Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, Sally Potter, and Laura Mulvey (with Peter Wollen). I take Rabinovitz’s point, here, about filmmakers like these being studied largely because of the degree to which they conform to the concerns of Euro-American (in truth, largely Anglo-American) feminist film theory. But what follows from this is a (highly detailed, rich, valuable) study that focuses single-mindedly on the North American context, and really the context of New York. That is not much of a step forward in terms of diversifying the study of experimental cinema, at least not in national terms.

      Indeed, one valuable aspect of Wollen’s article is the degree to which he recognizes that part of the problem has to do with the national specificity of production contexts. He writes at one point that the position is complicated too by the fact that in North America there is only one avant-garde, centred on the various Co-ops, a term which seems basically to mean operations like Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York.³ In North America, avant-garde has come to mean film made by one person working basically alone in a way that looks irreconcilably different from someone like Jean-Luc Godard or Andrei Tarkovsky. Constance Penley and Janet Bergstrom, writing in the English film journal Screen (but on behalf of the editorial collective of the American feminist film journal Camera Obscura), echoed this concern three years later. In their 1978 essay The Avant-Garde: Histories and Theories, they critiqued the minor flood of book-length studies of recent American experimental cinema, especially work by Sitney such as The Essential Cinema: Essays on the Films in the Collection of Anthology Film Archives, a 1975 anthology that explicitly attempted to carve out a cinematic canon that centred on American experimentalists and included a few classical Hollywood and European films:

      Although Anthology’s collection discussed and detailed in The Essential Cinema (edited of course by Sitney) makes narrative exceptions, predictably enough, for what has traditionally been seen as art cinema—the sublime achievements of a Bresson for example—it excludes filmmakers such as Godard, Straub and Huillet, Duras, Rainer, Akerman, Rivette, Mulvey and Wollen, among many others whose films constitute another direction, and an extremely vital one, of contemporary avant-garde film-making. Because they combine commercial and non-commercial aspects, narrative and non-narrative, and are constituted in different ways as political cinema, these films stand in contrast to prototypes of pure cinema, at any rate as they have usually been discussed. (124)

      This kind of exclusion has proved remarkably durable in discussions of American experimental filmmakers. Straub-Huillet are possessed of an aesthetic as radically outside of narrative realism as Brakhage’s, even if their camera moves a whole lot less. But I don’t know of many studies that put the two of them together as common examples of avant-garde film practice, studies that might offer some comparative insights on what a total rewrite of film language looks like in American versus European contexts. Actually, the one such study that I can name is by Sitney: his aforementioned Modernist Montage, from 1990. In a chapter on Cinematic Epiphanies, he writes, "If we look at a European work at this point, the Emersonian theology of Brakhage’s project may stand out more clearly by contrast. The opening sequence of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Moses und Aron is one of the most rigorous and systematic avoidances of shot–countershot in the history of the cinema" (203). He goes on in this vein for some while, also bringing in Bruce Baille’s All My Life (1966). Sitney may have seemed the embodiment of American experimental cinema’s parochialism in the 1960s and ’70s, and the cine-critical left was quite right to call him and his fellow travellers on that. Since then, though, Sitney himself has actually widened his scope quite a bit.

      The skepticism of the cine-critical left toward Brakhage and his fellow travellers (both critics and filmmakers) can be seen as an entirely reasonable bit of counter-history, for within the informal but surprisingly stable canon of North American experimental cinema, Brakhage looms particularly, almost oppressively large. His reputation was made in the 1960s on the strength of a number of films about his intimate life, which is to say: sex, birth, the landscape around his mountain home, and the worldview of his children. More than any other filmmaker working in the 1960s, he seemed to embody the idea that filmmakers could be like poets: they could work like them (alone), live like them (withdrawn from society), and create art that seemed to have the same subject matter (interior life, the ineffable, the wonder of the everyday, language itself). That is to say, he seemed to embody the idea that filmmakers could be like Romantic poets, and moreover the poets of that neo-Romanticism that has been such a strong current in American poetics: Walt Whitman right on through to Charles Olson. For Sitney, this is key, and I do admire the internationalist way in which he frames this matter. Writing in the preface to Visionary Film, he says, Just as the chief works of French film theory must be seen in the light of Cubist and Surrealist thought, and Soviet theory in the context of formalism and constructivism, the preoccupations of the American avant garde coincide with those of our post-romantic poets and Abstract Expressionist painters. Behind them lies a potent tradition of Romantic poetics (ix). David James, in an early article specifically on the Romantic qualities of Brakhage’s work titled The Filmmaker as Romantic Poet, saw this as a matter of lifestyle, especially the decision that Brakhage made to move with his young family to the mountains: "The ideal of an anti-technological, organically human cinema, alternative but not oppositional to Hollywood, was lived by Brakhage in his retreat from the city to a nineteenth-century log cabin in the Colorado wilderness, where with his family he could be most free from the dominant categories of modern urban life, free to re-create the Romantic problématique" (38). Moreover, radical gestures like making most of his films with no sound, making films of non-standard length (the few films of about ninety minutes in the Brakhage oeuvre seem like flukes), or making films that offered no compromises to conventional narrative or documentary film language, seemed also to place him in the lineage of radical American modernist poets like Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein. At the core of his work, then, is a very American heritage, and the degree to which Brakhage seemed to bring together a number of key strains in American poetics at least partially accounts for why he had such a privileged place for so long in the annals of that country’s non-narrative filmmaking.

      And yet, I have always felt that Brakhage never approved of the isolationist way in which his work was so often discussed. Some of this is instinctual, and based on informal conversations that I had with him over the years. I do not presume to have known Brakhage well, but from 1990 until 2003 I saw him at fairly regular intervals, largely owing to my working for the Telluride Film Festival (I was on the staff in one capacity or another for about twenty years), where, as this book will make clear, Brakhage was a fixture. He was always full of chat, not only about fellow experimentalists but about what we would today call world cinema (a concept I will, as I have said, discuss in greater detail in the conclusion): Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Im Kwon-taek, Martin Scorsese, and so on. Nothing that I had read about Brakhage prepared me for his interest in these kinds of filmmakers, and even by 1992—when, as a student at the University of Oregon I had my first real encounter with him⁴—I had read a fair bit. Of course, the signs had been there all along, just coming from Brakhage’s writing rather that the writing of others (in an echo of how I see the filmmaker Peter Hutton pushing his interpreters toward Abbas Kiarostami). It would be unfair, though, to fail to acknowledge the degree to which some of Brakhage’s statements would seem to encourage this sense that his cinema is unlike anything else. Sounding a very different tone from the one he struck in the Hollis Frampton interview that opens this book, he wrote in a 2 September 1990 letter to the poet Ronald Johnson (reprinted in Eirik Steinhoff’s special issue of Chicago Review):

      No time to answer at length, but yes!, I DO very much enjoy the movies (usually see almost everything that comes to town, including Univ. foreign movies, soforth): I don’t, however find them any more related to what I’m doing than you probably would good escape fiction—in fact not even maybe as much as that because Film has almost always and only been USED to illustrate other Arts, whereas the distinctions between, say, Prose and Poetry have a long-standing natural History. (28)

      David James has echoed this in several venues. As I mention above, James’s sense of Brakhage as a figure who withdrew from mainstream culture is the core of his 1983 Filmmaker as Romantic Poet article. Furthermore, in the introduction to his edited collection Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, James writes that Brakhage always enjoyed going to the movies, sometimes explaining the recreation as a means of staying in touch with the culture at large, but he never thought of the commercial cinema as in any way related to his own enterprise (15).

      I can see how one could conclude from statements like these that Brakhage was a movie buff in the manner of your average resident of Boulder, much as a poet might read mystery novels in a recreational way, and that his views on what he saw in a venue like the Telluride Film Festival aren’t really any more serious than anyone else’s, since that kind of cinema is so unconnected to what I’m doing, to his own enterprise. Thus, these pieces here wouldn’t offer much of a way into his work. Of course, I would disagree with all of that. Part of this has to do with Brakhage’s mention of how Prose and Poetry have a long-standing natural History. He reasonably doesn’t see an interaction between narrative and non-narrative film as part of the long-standing natural History of cinema, but there’s nothing here to suggest that he approves of this. The key word in his letter to Johnson, really, is escape, or in the case of James’s assessment, commercial. Brakhage does not suggest that fiction has no connection to what Ronald Johnson is up to, and there is no sense in this letter, or in anything that Brakhage said or wrote, that poets may as well give a pass to Tolstoy, Joyce, Musil, Woolf, or Duras, since that’s just fiction, and hey, we’re doing poetry over here. Brakhage doesn’t show much serious interest in these texts for the cinematic equivalent of good escape fiction; we find some early references to Ordinary People and Kramer vs. Kramer, but they are perfunctory, and references to that kind of middlebrow work basically vanish as Brakhage sinks into his gig at Rolling Stock. To dismiss Tarkovsky or Larissa Shepitko or Sergei Parajanov as unrelated to what’s going on in Brakhage’s work is to conflate fiction with good escape, or narrative with commercial; the status of those second parts as optional descriptors of the first ones does seem rather important. To put matters in a slightly more positive frame, what is also key is James’s 1982 formulation of Brakhage’s cinema as alternative but not oppositional to Hollywood. In that article, James also wrote that this situation, in which economic marginality mirrored massive social irrelevance, was exactly that faced by any independent film-maker who understood his or her work as art, as an end sufficient in itself rather than (as in Cassavetes’s case) as a means of entry into studio production system (36). I don’t disagree that Brakhage never saw himself as anything even remotely like a feature filmmaker in the John Cassavetes model. But there were feature filmmakers whose work he admired, thought about, and took seriously. One example? John Cassavetes, about whom, as you can see in the text International Cinema: The 12th Denver (reprinted here as Appendix B), Brakhage wrote: "his full-length work Shadows (which commercial interests persuaded him to ‘cut’ for theatrical release) is absolutely necessary for any real appreciation of the artistry of man."

      Moreover, there is a specificity to the situation of the late Soviet Union that prevented the rise of an avant-garde along the lines of what Brakhage and his fellow-travellers might have immediately recognized. It is clear to me that his long relationship with the Telluride Film Festival helped him move beyond this kind of parochialism and imagine other forms of poetic cinema. That process seems to have begun with Andrei Tarkovsky. In a letter of 12 May 1978, Telluride’s co-director Tom Luddy wrote to Brakhage:

      For example, I mentioned that we are considering honoring the Soviet director Tarkovsky. I would argue that he belongs with all the film poets you mentioned as possibilities for Telluride. You didn’t seem to know him, but surely you must agree that film-makers with the vision and personal commitment of Anger or Brakhage could exist in Russia, and if they do—like Eisenstein—the only way legally and technically for them to find expression is via 35mm production financed by the state. . . . I am fighting hardest for Tarkovsky, and when you meet him and see his films, I think you will agree that his presence at Telluride—if the Russians will let him out which is frankly doubtful—fulfills our commitment to the personal, poetic cinema.⁵

      Luddy was clear that just because a co-op-led, films-made-by-individuals-working-alone-type process was indeed inconceivable within Soviet film culture did not mean that the place therefore had no poetic cinema and no work that would connect with American experimentalists. Indeed, this was already happening in important ways at the level of poetry, with Eastern Bloc poets becoming more and more widely known in American literary circles, avant-garde ones very much included. The best example of this that I know of was the growing reputation of Osip Mandelshtam. While Mandelshtam was a major Soviet-era poet, he was not exactly an Eastern Bloc Charles Olson; he was part of an international modernism, for sure, but his work was not a full, radical break with the conventions of the poetry of his age, in the manner of Olson, say. He was poetic, but not exactly avant-garde. And yet, one of the avant-garde’s biggest Mandelshtam fans was Stan Brakhage. I discuss the Mandelshtam connection in more detail in the Critical Interlude, but suffice it to say for now that Brakhage was a passionate reader of Mandelshtam, seeing him as connected not only to his own work but to the American movement of which he was a part. In a letter of 10 July 1975, Carolee Schneeman wrote to Brakhage: I’ve been completely absorbed in the Mandelshtam. Thank you so much for it. Particularly the right gift to carry away from the meeting.⁶ Why it has taken so long for American experimental cinema to accept such gifts when they come in the form of film does indeed have much to do with the lack of a long standing natural History, not only between poetry and prose but between vanguard and tradition. As I will discuss in Chapter 1, subtitled A Conservative Avant Garde, that latter duality was one that Brakhage was highly invested in bridging. One way he tried to do that was, in highly select cases, by trying to bridge that first chasm, as well.

      There remains, though, the question of what exactly would motivate Brakhage to claim explicitly, in that Frampton interview, that he was part of a lineal tradition that included narrative filmmakers like Méliès, Griffith, Dreyer, and Eisenstein. It would be easy to see this as Brakhage jockeying for historical position, fighting the marginalization that his radically unconventional form would seem to guarantee, and trying, basically, to get himself into the canon alongside such unquestionably canonical names. Indeed, throughout this book, I have tried to strike a balance between using Brakhage’s writings and public statements as a way into his work and insisting on a need to return to the films themselves for evidence of any possible interpretation. Part of this is because of my own New Critical biases (something that I mention in note 10 to the Critical Interlude), but that is not the only reason. Reviewing Jane (Brakhage) Wodening’s 2016 book Brakhage’s Childhood, Jordan Cronk states explicitly what most who know Brakhage’s career well have experienced: A noted raconteur, Brakhage spent much of his adult life fashioning a sophisticated, charismatic public persona, one that his cinematic output . . . only worked to complicate with intimations of a troubled past and strained private life (74). In the 1970s, Brakhage was also using his public statements—especially his courses at the Art Institute of Chicago—in a similar although more outwardly directed way, to place his work within the context of filmmakers who were widely accepted by historians and critics as being foundational.

      Having said all that, I genuinely think something other than self-mythologizing is at work with Brakhage’s sense of his place in film history. Brakhage clearly took his connections to Romanticism seriously, and although he was less self-conscious about it, he also seemed aware of himself as a sort of modernist. There is no reason why adherence to either movement should be limited to a specific formal pattern: not all Romanticism is inherently poetic (although William Blake is a key figure), any more than all modernism is inherently novelistic (although James Joyce is a key figure). Brakhage saw his approach, I think, as a means by which cinema could avoid this kind of conflation between formal patterns like modernism and broad-stroke approaches like narrative vs. non-narrative. It’s a self-aggrandizing move in some ways, but not an unreasonable one. To my mind, Brakhage was unquestionably correct about the difficulty critics and historians have had seeing ’60s-era experimentalists as somehow connected to someone like Dreyer or Eisenstein (Méliès has always seemed like less of a leap, perhaps because he made short films).⁷ One of the main tasks of this book is to show the degree to which proposing himself as the solution to this difficulty was equally reasonable.

      Some of the earliest indications of Brakhage’s unwillingness to ignore either non-American or non-experimental filmmakers can be found in 1972’s The Brakhage Lectures. Sitney has placed this book, alongside 1977’s Film Biographies,⁸ in the context of the work that he began and then abandoned as part of the above-mentioned Essential Cinema canon-building project of Anthology Film Archives. Recalling Brakhage’s anger at how the committee rejected his belief that the list should be set by consensus, Sitney writes that:

      In reaction to this situation he withdrew his films from distribution [with New York’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative] temporarily and began to lecture on and publish his own canon of film history. The Brakhage Lectures (1972), Film Biographies (1977), and Film at Wit’s End (1989) fused the models of Gertrude Stein’s Four in America (1947), fantasies about Henry James, Wilbur Wright, Ulysses S. Grant, and George Washington, with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical case histories of The Wolf Man, The Rat Man, and Dr. Schreber, by imagining the childhoods of other filmmakers based on what he divined from their films. (Synopsis, 80)

      Sitney’s insight about the influence on Brakhage of Freud’s tendency to imagine childhoods is especially important, given how vigorous a reader of Freud Brakhage was over the long haul of his career (something I deal with in this book’s Critical Interlude). The chapter in The Brakhage Lectures on Carl Theodor Dreyer has Brakhage writing, "Let me present you now and again with the pieces of a puzzle written by Carl’s fellow countryman, Hans Christian Andersen, who’d died just a few years before Carl was, in 1899, born: to begin, then, this ‘first story’ of The Snow Queen, which must surely have been read to the young Carl again and again . . ." (61). But for me this is something of a thematic eccentricity rather than a full-bodied attempt at imaginative biography. Really, The Brakhage Lectures was a series of what might have once been called essays in criticism, derived from the class that he was then teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago. That is more or less how Guy Davenport (a figure whose tremendous importance to Brakhage I discuss below) described the enterprise in his introduction to the third section of Film Biographies: Biography for Brakhage is a drama of forces, and these lectures integrate biography and critical interpretation with an imaginativeness and energy unusual in American writing (209). The Brakhage Lectures is made up of chapters devoted to Georges Méliès, D.W. Griffith, Carl Dreyer, and Sergei Eisenstein. This would become the first section of Film Biographies. The second section of that later book, titled Comedy Tragi/Comedy, had chapters on Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Jean Vigo. That was introduced by the poet Edward Dorn, who would, two years later (as I discuss below), go on to co-found Rolling Stock, where Brakhage would publish his pieces on the Telluride Film Festival. The third, Davenport-introduced section, titled Narrative as Religion, had chapters on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and Alexander Dovzhenko. There is not an experimental filmmaker among this bunch except for Jean Vigo, who mostly made narrative films of one kind or another; there are not that many Americans, either (the Yanks account for a third of the chapters in total). In 1991, Brakhage did turn his attention to the American avant-garde with a book called Film at Wit’s End: Essays on American Independent Filmmakers. He was 58 when that came out, not exactly old but starting to take account of things, including his relationships to people who had mentored him (Maya Deren, Sydney Peterson) or with whom he had been personally close over many years (Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs). It is telling that when he was younger and at the peak of his form—when he was in his thirties and forties, basically—it was international cinema toward which he tended to turn.

      Furthermore, Brakhage’s teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder (hereafter CU-Boulder) was broadly internationalist, in keeping with this sense of Sitney’s that he was trying to build something of a new film canon. Many of his Film History classes in the late 1980s privileged experimental filmmakers over the usual suspects of Euro-American narrative filmmaking more common to such courses. In this way, he would seem to be following a version of the Anthology Film Archives–led canon that I discussed earlier. Indeed, the syllabus for his Film History class of fall 1989 indicates that its textbook was The Essential Cinema, the anthology of essays on that Anthology canon edited by Sitney.⁹ But as he moves forward, Brakhage’s sense of film history becomes almost dialectical, as he pairs the Euro-American canon with the Essential Cinema canon in a quasi-montage fashion. His course Film: 50s to the Present, offered in fall 1991, paired Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) with films by Paul Sharits and Jim Otis; he showed Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1983) with his own Night Music (1986). When he taught Film History II in spring 1994, the approach was fully dialectical: Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1946) was paired with Sydney Peterson’s The Lead Shoes (1949); Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960) was paired with Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray (1962) and America Is Waiting (1981); Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part II (1958) was paired with Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964); Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu (1959) was paired with three films by experimental animator Jordan Belson.¹⁰ What this most strongly recalls is the teaching strategy of Brakhage’s fellow filmmaker-theoretician-historian-pedagogue, everyone’s favourite Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. The lectures on film history that Godard delivered at Montreal’s Concordia University in 1978 paired excerpts of classic works with excerpts from his own work, creating a teaching style that was obviously the result of his long-standing interest in montage (which he famously called mon beau souci). Michael Witt’s introduction to the published version of these lectures (published in English as A True History of Cinema and Television) recalls how he and Serge Losique settled on a method: screening individual reels of three to five films in the morning, followed by one of his own in its entirety in the afternoon. Thus the morning session acquired a ‘kind of montage quality’ as Godard put it, in which he sought to create ‘a connecting thread, like a film, a musical theme (xxxv).

      My favourite example of Brakhage’s dialectical approach to American avant-garde and European narrative cinema is found in the first of two classes he taught on Werner Herzog in the summer and fall of 2000. In the first of these, he offered the following as a paper assignment:

      Considering the poet Charles Olson’s dicta (style is the visible manifestation of soul) might be true, or at least that style dictates intrinsic character, write an essay on the earthly soul of Werner Herzog as is visible to you in the films we have seen in class this semester. Consider two (2) or three (3) films in your essay. Support and substantiate your ideas by DETAILING SPECIFIC SHOT SEQUENCES of this work in the films you use.¹¹

      FIG. 1: Jane (Brakhage) Wodening and Stan Brakhage with Werner Herzog at the 1980 Telluride Film Festival. Brakhage was there to moderate a program of films by Oksar Fischinger that was being presented by his widow Elfriede Fischinger; Herzog was there with two short documentaries about American evangelists, God’s Angry Man and Huie’s Sermon (both 1980). PHOTO © 1980 LISA LAW.

      Olson’s influence on Brakhage’s generation of the American avant-garde was huge, but as with Brakhage, commentators on the great poet have tended to see him in exclusively American terms, with occasional gestures toward European philosophy. This little essay assignment strikes me as exemplary of an openness to comparison largely unknown in discourse either around the avant-garde or European filmmaking. That it came in 2000 and is based in the work of Werner Herzog, who comes to the Telluride Film Festival

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1