Stan Brakhage (January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an non-narrative filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the most important experimental filmmakers of the 20th century. He worked with various kinds of celluloid: 16mm, 8mm, 35mm, and IMAX, and was a practitioner of what he referred to as 'pure cinema'.
The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture.
This programme, curated by Andrea Franco, tries to capture the fascination for Astronomy and the Cosmos of a series of filmmakers who, since the origins of cinema, have explored the appearance and mysteries of the universe. The screen unfolds here like a night sky capable of revealing not only phenomena invisible to the naked eye, as shown in the films by Emily Richardson or Dominic Angerame, but also extravagant fantasies, the fruit of the artist's imagination, (Segundo de Chomón, Georges Melies…).
Fred Camper has written about the films of Stan Brakhage for over five decades. Collected here for the first time in a single volume, his writing forms a body of criticism commensurate with the importance of Brakhage's films to late 20th century American art.
Thursday, January 12, 2023, at 8pm Session : De la roche/About the Rock (in presence of Juliette Agnel) Espace En cours, Paris
Braquage proposes a session revolving around the material of rocks, boulders, stone and their geological or plastic modifications. (Screening with the photographer Juliette Agnel)
Regarded for decades as one of the monumental and iconic works of the historical American avant-garde, Stan Brakhage’s five-part Dog Star Man remains a defining and radically original work of independent cinema. Utilizing numerous inventive filmmaking techniques ranging from distortion lenses, multiple superimpositions, hyperkinetic editing, hand-painting, and even the physical collaging of materials onto the film strip, Dog Star Man employs a vividly subjective, hypnagogic vision following a mythic man’s ascent and struggle through the obstacles and vicissitudes of existence. Images of birth, death, nature, the cosmos, and the psyche gradually combine and coalesce over the course of the film’s 74 minutes with increasing intensity and complexity, resulting in a total cinematic experience that remains unique nearly sixty years after its initial making.
Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) is most well-known for the development, from the late 1950s onwards, of a cinema (he made over 450 films) in which the camera replaces the protagonist, freeing it from conventional positions and hence engagement with both subject and the viewer. His work is characterized by images where variations in exposure and focus, handheld camera movement, light flares, refractions and flashes are in a constant state of flux and interplay.
On November 4, 2001, the first session of Xcèntric took place, a regular program of screenings dedicated to experimental cinema and artists unpublished in the city of Barcelona.Just 20 years later, we celebrat
The impact of significant loss has exerted a powerful influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers. The Melancholy Lens offers a detailed look at biographical and psychological factors discernible in the art of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr with an aim toward a greater understanding of their work.
