Джеймс Брэкхейдж: Жизнь и творчество экспериментального кинематографиста

American filmmaker and writer (1933–2003)

James Stanley Brakhage ('/b//r//æ//k//ɪ//dʒ/ BRAKij; January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film. Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a large and diverse body of work, exploring a variety of formats, approaches and techniques that included handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in camera editing, scratching on film, collage film and the use of multiple exposures. Interested in mythology and inspired by music, poetry and visual phenomena, Brakhage sought to reveal the universal, in particular exploring themes of birth, mortality, sexuality, and innocence. and lyricism. While they were for many years obscure and hard to find, many are now readily available on DVD as well as other media. TOC

Brakhage explored new approaches to filmmaking in the 1970s. In 1971, he completed a set of three films inspired by public institutions in the city of Pittsburgh. These three films—Eyes, about the city police, Deus Ex, filmed in a hospital, and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, depicting autopsy—are collectively known as "The Pittsburgh Trilogy". In 1974, Brakhage made the feature length The Text of Light, consisting entirely of images of light refracted in a glass ashtray. In 1979, he experimented with Polavision, a format marketed by Polaroid, making about five 2 1/2 minute films. The whereabouts of these films are now unknown. He 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. He separated from Jane in 1986, and in 1989 married his second wife, Marilyn; the two went on to have two children together. In the late 1980s, Brakhage returned to making sound films, with the four part Faustfilm cycle, and also completed the hand painted film, The Dante Quartet. Brakhage was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1989.

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. Several more sound films were completed, including Passage Through: A Ritual, edited to the music of Philip Corner, Christ Mass Sex Dance and Ellipses Reel 5, both with music by James Tenney. He also produced the major meditations on childhood, adolescence, aging and mortality collectively known as the "Vancouver Island Quartet," as well as numerous hand painted works. Brakhage was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1996, and his bladder was removed. The surgery seemed successful, but the cancer eventually returned. In a video interview in 2002, he explained that his cancer was caused by the toxicity of the aniline dyes he had used to paint directly onto film. Brakhage retired from teaching and moved to Canada in 2002, settling with his second wife Marilyn and their two sons in Victoria, British Columbia. Brakhage died there on March 9, 2003, aged 70. The last footage Brakhage shot has been made available under the title Work in Progress. At the time of his death, Brakhage was also 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. Though not a practicing Christian during his adulthood, Brakhage requested a traditional Anglican service. The funeral was attended largely by family members, as well as a few friends from the filmmaking world, and included a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

In 1961, Jonas Mekas wrote that 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". Among Brakhage's students were Eric Darnell, the director of Antz, as well as the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and he is featured in their student film Cannibal! The Musical. Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ uses Brakhage's painted film style to depict the death of Jesus on the cross. Scorsese has framed samples of Brakhage's films on his office wall. The work of contemporary film and video artist Raymond Salvatore Harmon (1974 ) has been compared to Brakhage's abstract films. The credits of the film Seven (1995), with their scratched emulsion, rapid cutaways and bursts of light are in Brakhage's style. The opening track of Stereolab's album Dots and Loops (1997), "Brakhage", is named after him. Sonic Youth, joined by percussionist Tim Barnes, played along with silent Stan Brakhage films at a 2003 benefit show for Anthology Film Archives. The live recording is available as SYR6: Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui. The concluding credits to The Jacket (2005) are an homage to Brakhage's 1963 film Mothlight. The opening titles to the BBC television series The Living and the Dead (2016) use an excerpt from Mothlight. The 2011 film The Tree of Life and Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) include sequences reminiscent of Brakhage's work.

Brakhage wrote a number of books about films, including Metaphors on Vision (1963), A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book (1971), Film Biographies (1977, Turtle Island Books) and the posthumously published Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker (2003). Transcripts of his talks at the Chicago Art Institute were edited and published as Film at Wit's End: Eight Avant Garde Filmmakers, (Kingston, New York, McPherson & Co., 1989).