Stan Brakhage

Prolific experimental film-maker

In a prolific career spanning more than 50 years, Stan Brakhage produced an enormous body of work (around 400 films) of deep passion and daunting innovation in technique, form and content. He was a founding figure of avant-garde film as a medium of personal expression alongside the other fine arts.

Imposing physically, he loomed large for both his supporters in experimental film and his critics. His films have to be placed up with the work of major figures like Jackson Pollock, John Cage and Andy Warhol in their artistic achievement in the extraordinary flowering of visual arts in America since the Second World War.

Born Robert Sanders in 1933 in Kansas City, he was adopted and came to be known as Stan Brakhage. He attended Dartmouth College in 1951 but, unhappy, left after a semester. The following year, he made his first film, Interim. He then attended the Institute of Fine Art in San Francisco. The West Coast had been a hotbed of avant-garde film activity in the immediate post-war years. Key figures were Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, James Broughton, Gregory Markopoulos and Sidney Peterson, with whom he hoped to study at the institute. The film course had ceased so he joined a theatre company in Denver before returning to San Francisco, where he befriended the modernist poets Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Michael McClure and, especially, Robert Duncan, and the painter Jess Collins.

Acquiring 16mm equipment, he made Desistfilm (1954), the first of a series of films (including The Way to Shadow Garden, 1955, Reflections on Black, 1955, and Flesh of Morning, 1956) in which he tried to find his own film voice in the "trance" psychodrama style of Deren's classic Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Anger's gay classic Fireworks (1947).

In 1954 he moved to New York, where he met, among others, Deren, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken (who influenced his style), Cage and Varèse. In 1955 the Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell commissioned him to shoot a film, Wonder Ring. From this period until the early Sixties, Brakhage also eked a living with commercial film work including television advertisements and industrial films.

In 1957 he married Jane Collom, who was a powerful presence in his work. They settled in the Colorado mountains near Boulder. Working in relative isolation (Anger had moved to Paris and Deren produced little), Brakhage forged an intensely personal, free-flowing, hand-held camera aesthetic which reflected American poetry and the paintings of the abstract expressionists. He almost single-handedly redefined an avant-garde cinema in which form and content became inseparable and narrative drama was ousted by a lyrical poetics.

He was the film artisan par excellence, editing at times on his kitchen table, relishing the tactile quality of handling film. Brakhage was the first to explore fully the physical qualities of film – scratching, burning and staining the film strip; pushing images out of focus; blurring them with fast swivel pans, spitting on the lens for "impressionist" ends. He placed himself firmly in the romantic poetic visionary tradition. The camera was transformed from being a mere recording device to having the expressivity of a paintbrush. Implicit in this approach was an emphasis on process. He had already made the decision to exclude sound from his films even though music was ever an inspiration.

A brooding darkness, owing as much to his own personality as it did to a pessimistic Romanticism, pervades his work particularly in the Fifties and early Sixties. In Anticipation of the Night (1958), which heralded his hard-won breakthrough into lyricism, his own real threatened suicide haunts the film. The lyricism that dominated the Fifties took a more ambitious mythic turn culminating in what is seen by many as his masterpiece, Dog Star Man (1964), which describes with a primal, sometimes manic, energy the journey of self-discovery through an encounter with nature. It was reworked into The Art of Vision (1965), seen by some as his finest achievement.

Throughout the output was astonishing. The overall quality is awesome, fired by a incessant experimentalism and willingness to use his own life, family and environs as subject-matter. In this spirit he made one of his most popular films, Window Water Baby Moving (1959), a film of the birth of his first child which was branded pornographic at the time. Over a decade later a stay in hospital produced a film on the autopsy rooms, the brilliant, if daunting, The Act of Seeing with One's Eyes (1971). In 1963 he made another favourite, Mothlight, in which he glued leaves, moths and fragments from nature on to the film strip.

The theft of his 16mm equipment in 1964 enforced five years of exquisite films made on the "amateur" 8mm gauge. During the same time Warholian minimalism held sway in New York and eventually in Europe, leading to a distaste in some quarters for what was seen as his conservatism. In the Eighties he felt critically neglected and his family life came under strain, ending with his divorce in 1987. But with the collapse of formalism and the rise of a younger generation of film-makers, especially American women film-makers such as Abigail Child and Marjorie Keller, Brakhage's films once more became pertinent for their artistic expression of the "personal".

Brakhage taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Colorado (his students included the creators of South Park). He loved film, his tastes encompassing Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Lang and Tarkovsky. The feature film was the novel to his own poetry. He was deeply generous to his fellow film-makers, writing about their work, supporting films that often ran counter to his own sensibility. His books on film included Metaphors on Vision (1962), which set out his own aesthetic.

In the last decade of his life his output remained unnervingly high and explorative, turning to painting on film (35mm and Imax) for some beautiful abstract films, and in the Faust series of the late Eighties returning refreshed to the psychodrama.

Michael O'Pray

Robert Sanders (James Stanley Brakhage), film-maker: born Kansas City, Missouri 14 January 1933; married 1957 Jane Collom (two sons, three daughters; marriage dissolved 1987), 1989 Marilyn Jull (two sons); died Victoria, British Columbia 9 March 2003.