Film at REDCAT is proud to launch its Winter-Spring 2013 season with two momentous screenings (Sunday January 20 & Monday January 21) organized to celebrate avant-garde legend Stan Brakhage’s 80th birthday, in collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences & Los Angeles Filmforum. Sun Jan 20 | 5:00 pm Mon Jan 21 | 8:30 pm Jack H. Skirball Series $10 [members/students $8, CalArts $5] The Art of Vision: Two Nights Honoring Stan Brakhage Stan Brakhage’s (1933-2003) passionate and lifelong devotion to filmmaking as a radical, resolutely personal practice still pushes the boundaries of cinema as art ten years after his death. In more than 350 films completed during fifty-one years of uninterrupted activity, Brakhage explored cinematic vision as a means of poetic expression and used film to create revelations of the physical world. Defying traditional film language, Brakhage's distinctive techniques—hand-held camera movement, rapid editing, intricate superimpositions, photographic abstractions, and painting directly on the film surface— contributed to a singular, humanizing sensibility. In celebration of Brakhage’s eightieth birthday (January 14), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles Filmforum, and REDCAT co- present two evenings of major early works: The Art of Vision (1961- 65, 255 min.), a rare screening with a new print of Brakhage’s monumental and deeply meditative ‘deconstruction’ of Dog Star Man (Jan 20); Early Short Masterworks (Jan 21), eight films newly restored by the Academy Film Archive, ranging from the seminal psychodrama, Reflections on Black (1955) to his landmark ode to subjective seeing, Anticipation of the Night (1958). In Person: Curators Steve Anker and Mark Toscano “For Brakhage, the goal of cinema was the liberation of the eye itself, the creation of an act of seeing, previously unimagined and undefined by conventions of representation, an eye as natural and unprejudiced as that of a cat, a bee or an infant. There were few filmmakers - film director is too limiting a description - who went so far to train audiences to see differently.” – Ronald Bergan, The Guardian “If Maya Deren invented the American avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage realized its potential. He single-handedly transformed the schism separating the avant-garde from classical filmmaking into a chasm. And the ultimate consequences have yet to be resolved; his films appear nearly as radical today as the day he made them.” – Brian Frye, Senses of Cinema PROGRAMS Sunday Jan 20, 5:00 pm The Art of Vision (1961-65, 16mm, color, silent, 255min.) (new print from the Academy Film Archive; preservation by MoMA) “The Art of Vision is a film that can change our whole ideas about the relationship of seeing, perception, and emotion with the preoccupations of the mind and the subconscious. The immediate effect of seeing the film for the first few times is to discover oneself infinitely more sensitive to the meanings inherent in our perceptions of the physical qualities of everyday objects. To put it bluntly, Brakhage has shown the value and meaning of real seeing. The manner in which we perceive the physical structure of the world around us determines our view of that world. This is the principle on which all great films have been based. But it has never been clearer than in The Art of Vision.” (Fred Camper, Film Culture) Monday Jan 21, 8:30 pm *Reflections on Black (1955, 16mm, b/w, sound, 11min.) “The film imagines the dream-vision of a blind man as he walks through a city, climbs the stairs of his apartment building and arrives home. Brakhage signals the blindness of his protagonist by physically scratching out his eyes, and splices in bits of film negative to convey the sense of experience the world as a blind man might, not as something seen, but something pictured.” (Senses of Cinema) The Wonder Ring (1955, 16mm, color, silent, 5.5min.) “Recommended by critic Parker Tyler, Joseph Cornell commissioned Brakhage to create a film portrait of New York’s soon- to-be-demolished Third Avenue El in early 1955. Supplied with two tokens and some 16mm Kodachrome film, Brakhage created an ephemeral study of the movement, color, light, and space of the El and his own experience of riding it. Freed from the notion of working within the confines of story or character, The Wonder Ring marked a major early turning point in Brakhage’s development.” (Mark Toscano) Zone Moment (1956, 16mm, color, silent, 3.5min.) “This, an early work which I had assumed destroyed, was discovered in 1995 (by someone who wishes to remain anonymous) and thus is available for ‘tone poem’ time-travel to the ‘50s.” (SB) Daybreak and White Eye (1957, 16mm, b/w, sound, 9.5min.) “These two films investigate frustrations in loving, Daybreak with a girl as object, White Eye with the camera as subject." (SB) “These two films have to be seen together, for each deal with a complementary visual approach: Daybreak delves into the possibilities offered by editing, while White Eye focuses on camera movement.” (Hors Champ) *Loving (1957, 16mm, color, silent, 4min.) “The greens of the forest, the flesh tones of the lovers, the browns of earth, the sky and the sun evolve.” (SB) *Sirius Remembered (1959, 16mm, color, silent, 10.5min.) Documents the gradual dissolution of the corpse of the family dog. “I was coming to terms with decay of a dead thing and the decay of the memories of a loved being that had died and it was undermining all abstract concepts of death. The form was being cast out by probably the same physical need that makes dogs dance and howl in rhythm around a corpse. I was taking song as my inspiration and for the rhythm structure, just as dogs dancing, prancing around a corpse, and howling in rhythm-structures or rhythm-intervals might be considered like the birth of some kind of son.” (SB) *The Dead (1960, 16mm, color & b/w, silent, 10.5min.) Film shot in in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. “The Dead became my first work in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential. The action of making The Dead kept me alive.” (SB) *Anticipation of the Night (1958, 16mm, color, silent, 40min.) “Influenced by the writings of Gertrude Stein, Brakhage created his first longer-form masterwork. Fleeting, transient moments interact with more concrete and repetitious ones, in a dance of cognitive and emotional associations that feels both ever-widening and ever- enclosing as the film progresses. Diverse images of the night, children at play, shadows, sunlight, and nature trapped and liberated advance and retreat in a series of phrases that recall Stein’s own linguistic forms of repetition and variation, ultimately leading us to a holistic (rather than literal or linear) understanding of the character’s(/filmmaker’s) mental and emotional state… The film was quickly embraced and understood as a major work by a brilliant and revolutionary film artist.” (Mark Toscano) All films showing restored prints from the Academy Film Archive. Films marked with an * were restored by the Academy with support from The Film Foundation. Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933, Stan Brakhage moved to Denver, Colorado at the age of six. He sang as a boy soprano soloist, dreamed of being a poet, and graduated from South High School in 1951 with a scholarship to Dartmouth. After one semester, he left to pursue a life in the arts, returning to Denver to make his first film in 1952. As a young man, Brakhage lived in San Francisco and New York associating with many other poets, musicians, painters and filmmakers, including Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, John Cage, Edgar Varese, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren and Marie Menken. A youthful "poet-with-a-camera," Brakhage soon emerged as a significant film artist, evolving an entirely new form of first person, lyrical cinema. Brakhage married Jane Collom in 1957, and from the early 60s they lived in Rollinsville, Colorado, making films and raising their five children. Brakhage also continued to travel around the country and abroad, becoming a leading figure of the American avant-garde film movement. He lived in Boulder from 1986 until 2002, when he moved to Canada with his second wife, Marilyn, and their two children. Before his death in March, 2003, Brakhage had completed more than 350 films, ranging from the psycho-dramatic works of the early 1950s to autobiographical lyrics, mythological epics, "documents," and metaphorical film “poems” – variously employing his uniquely developed hand-held camera, rapid editing techniques, multiple superimpositions, collages, photographic abstractions, and elaborate hand-painting applied directly to the surface of the film. Brakhage was a deeply personal filmmaker, whose project was to explore the nature of light and all forms of vision. He frequently referred to his works as "visual music," or as documents of "moving visual thinking." The majority of his films are intentionally silent. Brakhage taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The recipient of three Honorary Degrees and numerous prestigious awards, he lectured extensively on filmmaking and the Arts, and is the author of 11 books - including his seminal 1963 work, Metaphors On Vision, and his more recent series of essays, Telling Time. – Marilyn Brakhage “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception… How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color.