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Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) completed his first film, INTERIM, in 1952 at the age of 19, and over 50 years of filmmaking, completed more than 300 personal, independent works ranging in length from nine seconds to four hours and incorporating a wide variety of innovative and uniquely expressive forms and techniques. In addition, he wrote several books, including Metaphors on Vision, A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book, The Brakhage Lectures, Seen, Film Biographies, The Brakhage Scrapbook, Film at Wit’s End, I...Sleeping, and The Domain of Aura.
Brakhage lectured extensively at universities, colleges, museums, galleries, film societies, and film festivals throughout the world, his interests and areas of knowledge including the histories and aesthetics of music, painting, poetry and film. In addition to his public lecturing, Brakhage taught film history and aesthetics from 1969 through 1981 at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and from 1981 to 2002 taught in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was a Distinguished Professor.
Brakhage lived for many years with his growing family in the Colorado mountains near Boulder and during that time made films primarily inspired by and expressive of the environment in which he lived (though that source being “as diverse as to have included love-making, childbirth, children’s play, mountains in snow-storm, potted plants, flames of heart and forest fires, trips to town and, even, journeys around the world”). From 1986 Brakhage lived in the town of Boulder, where he gave ongoing support to many younger filmmakers while continuing his own prolific output of work, creating work that was photographed, hand-painted on film and, in the last few years, films created by scratching and gouging the film emulsion itself.
Stan Brakhage received a number of honors and awards for his contributions to the arts, including: The Brussels World Fair Protest Award (1958), Film Culture’s Fourth Independent Film Award (1962), a Rockefeller Fellowship (1967-1969), three Museum of Modern Art Retrospectives (1971, 1977 & 1996), a Brandeis Citation (1973), the Colorado Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities (1974), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1978), the Jimmy Fyan Morris Memorial Foundation Award (1979), a Telluride Film Festival Medallion (1981), an Honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute (1981), the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists (1986), the Denver International Film Festival Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Art of Film (1988), a University of Colorado Medal (1988), and the MacDowell Colony Medal (1990). |
