Photograph by Friedl Kubelka. Though the photo was not attributed in the Filmex '76 program, it was later used on the cover of Kubelka's 2006 book Portraits of American Independent Filmmakers 1974–1981, confirming its authorship.
Stan Brakhage
FilmmakerKnown for:
avant-garde film painting; Dog Star Man (1961–64)
Education:
Dartmouth College (briefly); San Francisco Art Institute (briefly); largely self-taught
Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films across five decades - most of them short, many of them wordless, several of them painted or scratched directly onto celluloid - developing a cinema of pure visual experience outside narrative convention. His critical writing, particularly Metaphors on Vision (1963), argued that cinema should restore to the eye its original, pre-linguistic freshness of perception. He was among the most radical and influential figures in American avant-garde film.
Stan Brakhage's Gear List(1)
Bolex
Connection Source
WikipediaBook
Connection note
Brakhage shot the majority of his films on a Bolex H16 camera; its spring-wound mechanism — which limited takes to 28 seconds — shaped the rhythmic structure of many of his works. Documented in P. Adams Sitney's Visionary Film (1974) and in Brakhage's own published letters.
Product description
The Bolex H16 is a spring-wound 16mm film camera first produced in the 1930s and manufactured in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland for decades. Its mechanical simplicity, reliability, and optical quality made it the instrument of choice for avant-garde and experimental filmmakers. Jonas Mekas used one for decades of diary films; Stan Brakhage made most of his works with one.
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Last updated March 20, 2026
