Brakhage (1998)
BRAKHAGE explores the depth and breadth of the filmmaker’s genius, the exquisite splendor of his films, his magic personal charm, his aesthetic fellow travelers, and the influence his work has had on generations of other creators. While touching on significant moments in Brakhage’s biography, the film celebrates Brakhage’s visionary genius, and explores the extraordinary artistic possibilities of cinema, a medium mostly known only for its commercial applications in the form of narratives, cartoons, documentaries, and advertising. BRAKHAGE combines excerpts from Brakhage’s films and films of other avant-garde filmmakers (eg, George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Willie Varela, Bruce Elder, and others); interviews with Brakhage, his friends, family, colleagues, and critics; archival footage of Brakhage spanning the past thirty-five years; and location shooting in Boulder, Colorado and New York.
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Very disappointing...
How sad is this?
It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
a wonderful, honest documentarya lot of short clips of his movies are included (a seldom chance for a fan to get a view on them on television)spread the word: visionary, creative filmmaking is alive !please release it on dvd!(let's open a broader publics eyes for innovative filmmaking - in this age of dull formular cinema making, where everybody doses away and loses even the rest of his imagination)wake up to maya deren and stan brakhage !!!
The movie does a serviceable job of setting out the broad trajectory of Brakhage's career and the development of his interests (although relies too much on archival PBS and such footage in which Brakhage is apparently dumbing-down his theories for mass consumption), but seems unduly rushed; when it's asserted at the end that Brakhage stands as one of the two or three most important filmmakers of all time, it's impossible to agree on the basis of the evidence that's been presented. This gets especially difficult in respect of the later work, which looks here like a resort to primitivism and abstraction based on sheer exhaustion as much as on anything more cerebral. On a more straightforwardly curious level, one wonders about such missing elements as Brakhage's early life, or how he managed to finance what looks like a reasonably comfortable life out of such commercially marginal endeavours. Brakhage looks now like an avuncular figure, lumbering around with his (grandkids?), open about his bladder problems, at one point singing Old Man River - it's all pleasant enough but seems distinctly incidental, and the movie shows too little of the younger and allegedly edgier, more difficult Brakhage. The film whets the appetite reasonably well, but ultimately one can't help but think it would be a more appropriate metaphorical tribute to his work if it wasn't itself so conventional and straightforward.