31 Facts About Stan Brakhage

James Stanley Brakhage was an American filmmaker.

Stan Brakhage is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.

Stan Brakhage's films are often noted for their expressiveness and lyricism.

Stan Brakhage was raised in Denver, Colorado, where he attended South High School with the filmmakers Larry Jordan and Stan Phillips, and the composers James Tenney, and Ramiro Cortes.

Stan Brakhage briefly attended Dartmouth College on a scholarship before dropping out to make films.

Stan Brakhage completed his first film, Interim, at the age of 19; the music for the film was composed by his school friend James Tenney.

In 1953, Stan Brakhage moved to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, then called the California School of Fine Arts.

Stan Brakhage found the atmosphere in San Francisco more rewarding, associating with poets Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, but did not complete his education, instead moving to New York City in 1954.

Stan Brakhage would collaborate with the latter two, making two films with Cornell and using Cage's music for the soundtrack of his first color film, In Between.

Stan Brakhage spent the next few years living in near poverty, depressed about what he saw as the failure of his work.

Stan Brakhage tried to make money on his films, but had to take a job making industrial shorts to support his family.

In 1958, Jane gave birth to the first of the five children they would have together, a daughter called Myrrena, an event Stan Brakhage recorded for his 1959 film Window Water Baby Moving.

From 1961 to 1964, Stan Brakhage worked on a series of five films known as the Dog Star Man cycle.

Stan Brakhage couldn't afford to replace it, instead opting to buy cheaper 8mm film equipment.

Stan Brakhage soon began working in the format, producing a 30-part cycle of 8mm films known as the Songs from 1964 to 1969.

The Songs include one of Stan Brakhage's most acclaimed films, 23rd Psalm Branch, a response to the Vietnam War and its presentation in the mass media.

Stan Brakhage began teaching film history and aesthetics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969, commuting from his home in Colorado.

In 1974, Stan Brakhage made the feature-length The Text of Light, consisting entirely of images of light refracted in a glass ashtray.

Stan Brakhage continued his visual explorations of landscape and the nature of light and thought process, and through the late 1970s and early 1980s produced filmic equivalents of what he termed "moving visual thinking" in several series of photographic abstractions known as the Roman, Arabic, and Egyptian series.

Stan Brakhage taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder off and on, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Stan Brakhage separated from Jane in 1986, and in 1989 married his second wife, Marilyn; the two went on to have two children together.

Stan Brakhage remained extremely productive through the last two decades of his life, sometimes working in collaboration with other filmmakers, including his University of Colorado colleague Phil Solomon.

Stan Brakhage produced the major meditations on childhood, adolescence, aging and mortality collectively known as the "Vancouver Island Quartet," as well as numerous hand-painted works.

Stan Brakhage was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1996, and his bladder was removed.

Stan Brakhage retired from teaching and moved to Canada in 2002, settling with his second wife Marilyn and their two sons in Victoria, British Columbia.

The last footage Stan Brakhage shot has been made available under the title Work in Progress.

At the time of his death, Stan Brakhage was working on the Chinese Series, a work that was achieved by scratching directly on to film, a technique that was employed by the French artist Isidore Isou in 1950.

In 1961, Jonas Mekas wrote that Stan Brakhage is "one of the four or five most authentic film artists working in cinema anywhere, and perhaps the most original filmmaker in America today".

Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ uses Stan Brakhage's painted film style to depict the death of Jesus on the cross.

The opening track of Stereolab's album Dots and Loops, "Stan Brakhage", is named after him.

Stan Brakhage wrote a number of books about films, including Metaphors on Vision, A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book, Film Biographies and the posthumously published Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker.