In this volume, editor Suranjan Ganguly collects eight of Stan
Brakhage's most important interviews in which the filmmaker
describes his conceptual frameworks, his theoriesof vision and
sound, the importance of poetry, music, and the visual arts in
relation to his work, his concept of the muse, and the key
influences on his art-making. In doing so, Brakhage (1933-2003)
discusses some of his iconic films, such as Anticipation of the
Night, Dog Star Man, Scenes from Under Childhood, Mothlight, and
Text of Light. One of the most innovative filmmakers in the history
of experimental cinema, Brakhage made almost 350 films in his
fifty-two year- long career. These films include psychodramas,
autobiography, Freudian trance films, birth films, song cycles,
meditations on light, and hand-painted films, some of which range
from nine seconds to over four hours in duration. Born in Kansas
City, Missouri, he lived most of his life in the mountains of
Colorado, teaching for twenty-one years in the film studies program
at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As a filmmaker, Brakhage's
life-long obsession with what he called an "adventure in
perception" made him focus on the act of seeing itself, which he
tried to capture on film in multiple ways both with and without his
camera and by scratching and painting on film. Convinced that there
is a primary level of cognition that precedes language, he wrote of
the "untutored eye" with which children can access ineffable visual
realities. Adults, who have lostsuch primal sight, can "retrain"
their eyes by becoming conscious of what constitutes true vision
and the different ways in which they daily perceive the world.
Brakhage's films experiment with such perceptions, manipulating
visual and auditory experience in ways that continue to influence
film today.
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