Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (Wide Angle Books)

Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker is a collection of essays, photographs, personal statements and reminiscences about the celebrate filmmaker, who died in 2003. The producer of some four hundred films, he is widely recognized as one of the great artists of the medium. His innovations in fast cutting, hand-held camerawork, and multiple superimpositions together created an unprecedentedly rich texture of images that provided the vocabulary for the explosion of independent filmmaking in the 1960s. His use of his own life and family as his subject matter and then later, his turn to hand-painted abstract films, inspired generations of filmmakers who refused the rewards of the mainstream film industry and instead tried to make cinema an artform directed by its own integrity and the vision of human emancipation. The essays in this book, by historians and filmmakers and other artists, describe Brakhage's contributions to the rich history of filmmaking in the world.