Stan Brakhage
FilmmakerKnown for: avant-garde film painting; Dog Star Man (1961–64)
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.
Gear & Materials(1)
Bolex
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.
“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.”
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