For those of you unfamiliar with his work, he was an experimental film maker who painted directly and glued objects objects on film. His movies for the most part had no sound, including dialogue narration or music. One was entitled '...' In describing his work Brakhage said that Hollywood movies were 'novels' and his were 'poems'. We're talking something other than David Lynch here. Brakhage taught in Colorado, and among his students were the creators of the South Park series; they were mutual fans. It was reported that the cancer he had could have been caused by working with toxic paint that he used to make his films. His 26 films will be released on DVD by Criterion in May.
gee. I'm sorry to hear that. I dug his stuff. I remember seeing "the text of light", which was nothing but flashes of light shot thru a glass ashtray...it put sort of a spell on you watching it.
I only recall the titles of two Brakhage films I saw, Window Water Baby Moving and The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes. The latter is literally an autopsy, graphic and beautiful. I showed it to my nursing school class about twenty years after I first saw it in college, never having seen it in between. It didn't go over that well, since they didn't 'learn' anything, but of course the movie is about seeing, not necessarily learning or knowing. I'm sure I'll be looking at a number of the films when they become available on DVD. Nice to know Brakhage has a few fans here.
