On Thu, 24 Feb 1994 13:05:38 -0600 Rhandon Hurst said:

>        Speaking of intense and beautiful, I'm curious as to what if any changes

>in critical interpretation

>of Stan Brakhage's work has occurred since PA Sitney's Visionary Film.  What's

>the current assessment of his work in film academia?

 

Let me recommend a few revisions of Brakhage, from over the past 10 years

or so.  You can do the actual reading, if you like, rather than relying

on any detailed precis by the likes of me.

 

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver: Arden Press, 1983)

points toward a more socially critical approach to Brakhage's work, though

the book doesn't follow through with any fully developed discussion of

Brakhage's work.

 

Marjorie Keller's The Untutored Eye (Rutherford, NJ:  Fairleigh Dickinson

Univ. Press, 1986) examines themes of childhood in Brakhage's films, as

well as Joesph Cornell's and Jean Cocteau's.

 

David James's Allegories of Film (Princeton:  Princeton Univ. Press, 1989)

does set Brakhage's work of the 1960s into the context of avant-garde and

radical film production during that period.

 

One of the most interesting of the lot, for me, is William C. Wees's

Light Moving in Time (Berkeley:  Univ. of California Press, 1992),

which systematically examines ideas of vision in some examples of

avant-garde filmmaking.  Understandably enough, Brakhage features

prominently.

 

To connect with the original subject of this exchange, I recently

received a copy (which means I got it, but I haven't read it yet)

of Wees's short book, produced last year at Anthology Film Archives

in conjunction with a series he programmed there, titled Recycled

Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, which as the

title indicates, concerns films that employ previously existing

material.  (I didn't find Decodings in a quick scan of the

filmography.)

 

Blaine Allan                           [log in to unmask]

Film Studies

Queen's University

Kingston, Ontario

Canada  K7L 3N6