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Since the late 1950s Stan Brakhage has been in the forefront of independent filmmaking. His body of work — some seventy hours — is one of the largest of any filmmaker in the history of cinema, and one of the most diverse. Probably the most widely quoted experimental filmmaker in history, his films typify the independent cinema.
Until now, despite well-deserved acclaim, there has been no comprehensive study of Brakhage’s oeuvre. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition fills this void. R. Bruce Elder delineates the aesthetic parallels between Brakhage’s films and a broad spectrum of American art from the 1920s through the 1960s.
This book is certain to stir the passions of those interested in artistic critique and interpretation in its broadest terms.
Table of Contents for
The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson by R. Bruce Elder
With Gratitude
Acknowledgments
Preface
From the Givenness of Nature to the Encumbered Modern Body
The Signifying Body
The Two Bodies in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Body Observed Externally and the Body Experienced from Within
The Modern Body’s Unbearable Burden of Being
The Harmony of Spirit and Body
The Primacy of the Subject Body and the Recessiveness of the Subject Body
Chapter 1. Four for America: Williams, Pound, Stein, Brakhage
Styles of English Metre
Meaning and Personal Being: Pound and Brakhage
The Seachange: Or, How Pound Came “To Break the Pentameter”
Bergson, Hulme, Pound, and Brakhage on the Body and Energy
Experience as Energy: A Pattern for Thinking
First-Person Singular: Bergson, Hulme, and Brakhage on the Primacy of Individuality
Between Self and World: The Image in Hulme, Williams, Brakhage
Writing = Composing Sound’s Energies, Filmmaking = Composing Light’s Energies: Gertrude Stein and Stan Brakhage’s Conceptions of Their Media
Digressive Interpolation: The Persistence of Emerson’s Vision in Stein’s Writing and Brakhage’s Filmmaking
Out of Stein: A Theory of Meaning for Stan Brakhage’s Films
The Paradox of a Perlocutionary Semantics: Brakhage and Stein on Artistic Meaning
The Romanticism of Brakhage’s Conception of Meaning
Chapter 2. The Conception of the Body in Open Form Poetics and Its Influence on Stan Brakhage’s Filmmaking
H. Lawrence and the Poetics of Energy
Two Crucial Influences on Embodied Poetics: A.N. Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
A.N. Whitehead’s Project: Reconciling Permanence and Flux
Olson’s Energetics of Embodied Existence
Michael McClure’s Poetics: The Body Is an Organism. The Universe Is an Organism. A Poem Embodies an Aspect of the Universe’s Evolving Form
Allen Ginsberg: The Breath, the Voice, and the Poem
Action Painting as Performance
Glossary
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Stan Brakhage Filmography
Index