COMMISSIONED/COMMERCIAL WORK
PITTSBURGH (1959)
35mm, color, sound, 28m
Brakhage was part of a filmmaking team that produced this film, and which also included Weegee, Stan Vanderbeek, and others, under the auspices of On Film, a Princeton, NJ based company Brakhage briefly worked for (starting in July-August 1958).
SELF ENCOUNTER: A STUDY IN EXISTENTIALISM (1961)
Brakhage produced the film Sartre’s Nausea for this public television program created and hosted by Hazel Barnes on KRMA-TV in Boulder (but aired nationally), as well as at least two other 16mm sequences. Sartre’s Nausea appears in the episode called “To Leap or Not to Leap”, which was broadcast April 19, 1961. I’ve scanned quickly through the other extant episodes of this series (thanks to Mike Mashon and the Library of Congress) and I haven’t yet clearly located the presence of these other two unnamed sequences, but they may be there somewhere. I spoke to Barnes herself on 8/9/2006 and she remembered all of his sequences being commissioned for a single episode on Sartre. Besides the Nausea film, she recalled that he had perhaps done sequences on Zeus talking with Orestes and a piece on Camus, featuring a sequence where the mundane leads to the absurd, with a man staring at his glass of beer.
COLORADO LEGEND (1961)
16mm, color, sound, 11m
Directed by Stan Phillips
Photography, Editing, and Pictorial Direction by Stan Brakhage
This is an educational/informational film made as a commissioned work for the Colorado Department of Public Relations through Western Cine, which was a film laboratory (and Brakhage’s primary lab), but also a production company for educational films for an unknown period in the early 1960s. Although directed by Brakhage’s longtime friend Stan Phillips, Brakhage is credited with “photography, editing, and pictorial direction”, and the film bears some hallmarks of his personal style.
MR. TOMPKINS INSIDE HIMSELF (1962)
16mm, color, sound, 41m (41:11)
Written and Directed by Stan Brakhage
Photographed by John Newell
This is an educational film made by Brakhage with Western Cine owner John Newell (who also photographed much of the film), based on “Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life” by George Gamow. Western Cine was a film laboratory (and Brakhage’s primary lab), but also a production company for educational films for an unknown period in the early 1960s. Although some of the medical and scientific footage in this film was obtained from separate sources, there is a credit stating “Microphotography of Vessels of Living Bat’s Wing, Mouse Lung, Red Blood, Slides, and Photography of Internal Heart of Sheep and External Heart of Living Dog by Stan Brakhage and George Gamow”. Some of this footage was also used by Brakhage in Dog Star Man.
BALLAD OF THE COLORADO UTE (1963)
16mm, color, sound, 17m
Written and Directed by Stan Phillips
Photography, Editing, and Pictorial Continuity by Stan Brakhage
This is an educational/informational film made as a commissioned work for the Colorado Department of Public Relations. Although written and directed by Brakhage’s longtime friend Stan Phillips, Brakhage is credited with “photography, editing, and pictorial continuity”, and the film bears some hallmarks of his personal style.
BURNING OF SODOM, FOR SUTHERLAND’S “MY SISTER, MY SPOUSE” (ca. early 1970s)
16mm, color, silent, 15 seconds (to be looped?)
This piece isn’t fully identified. Donald Sutherland (not the actor) was a friend of Brakhage’s and a Classics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. My Sister, My Spouse is a verse play of his from 1959. It’s reasonably possible that this 15-second sequence of film — comprising only sparse flames in front of a dark background — was created by Brakhage as a sequence to be loop projected in a staging of the play as a fire effect, though this is just an educated guess. The original for the film is only 9 feet of 16mm color footage, but is leadered for printing and was definitely printed by Western Cine, with Brakhage and Don Sutherland labeled as the clients for the printing job. The title as given above is how the leader was labeled in Brakhage’s handwriting. Although the film stock is from 1967 (and Brakhage did not typically shoot outdated stock), the original lab printing paperwork (undated unfortunately) for this project indicates it was printed on 7389 reversal print stock (which means 1970 at earliest), and the paperwork appears very generally to be from the early 1970s to my eye. So I believe it’s fairly likely that the footage was pre-existing (and not originally made for this project), and Brakhage selected and printed it for Sutherland at a later time.
Film stock notes: This film was shot on 1967 7242 Ektachrome EF stock.
In addition to the above, Fred Camper’s filmography references these commercial projects that Brakhage worked on:
Martin Missil Quarterly Reports, made for Hughes Sound Films (1957)
Opening (produced for G.E. Television Theatre by On Film Co.) (1958)
Films on Mt. Rushmore, Korczak Ziolkowski, and Sitting Bull (1963-1964)
Short television spots for Rural Electric of Dakota (1963-1964)
MISCELLANEOUS BRAKHAGE INVOLVEMENT
NUPTIAE (1969) by James Broughton
Cinematogrpahy by Brakhage.
ST. TULA’S PAGODA (2003) by Mary Beth Reed
16mm, bw & color, 7.5m
This is a film made by Mary Beth Reed using gifted strips of painted film from Brakhage. According to Reed, found in a relayed message via a private film site:
“I made the film before traveling to Japan to participate in the Brakhage Retrospective November 2003, in Yokohama…I took the work print of St. Tula’s Pagoda with me and screened it there. I left that work print as a gift, thinking that I would cut the negative and make prints when I returned to Boulder.
“Before going to Japan, I made the VHS transfer that is on vimeo, and tried to write the film edge numbers with the cuts down so I could cut the negative and make prints. I realized when I got home from Japan, that it was going to be a challenge to cut the negative, and never finished that, so there’s only one film copy of the cut.
“It’s made from painted film loops that Stan gave me, repeated on different film stocks like color print stock #3383 and hi con #7363. And the idea was that each version was a level of the pagoda progressing until the top reaches white light. St Tula is in the title, because in 2001, maybe?, Stan had visited Bard, and received an honorary doctorate. They had little cards with their patron saint of film – St Tula.”
STAN BRAKHAGE APPEARANCES
Brakhage appeared in a number of his own films, but also made appearances in other people’s films over the years, in some instances as an actor, but more often as himself, in a diary/portraiture/nonfiction context. I decided to only include examples here that represent what can be more or less considered as actual consciously constructed/released works, and left out some of the more raw footage or casual documentations that circulate, as well as filmed public appearances. There are probably plenty of unintentional omissions here, so please let me know if you have additions to suggest!
TRUMPIT (1956) by Lawrence Jordan
THE ONE ROMANTIC ADVENTURE OF EDWARD (1956) by Lawrence Jordan
BRAKHAGE ON FILM (1965) by Arnold Gassan
DIARIES, NOTES, AND SKETCHES (aka WALDEN) (1968) by Jonas Mekas
FILMMAKERS (1969) by Takahiko Iimura
LEGENDARY EPICS, YARNS AND FABLES PART 2: STAN BRAKHAGE (1969) by Stephen Gebhardt
REALITY’S INVISIBLE (1972) by Robert Fulton
NOTES ON THE BUFFALO CONFERENCE: “AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA” (1973) by Robert Haller & Dan Ochiva
Two SCREENING ROOM episodes (1973 & 1980)
A Boston television program created and hosted by Robert Gardner, on which independent filmmakers would visit and share their work.
GRAND OPERA: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE (1978) by James Benning
STAN & JANE BRAKHAGE (1981) by Willie Varela
REFLECTING THOUGHT: STAN BRAKHAGE (1985) by Jason Starr
INVOCATION: MAYA DEREN (1986) by Jo Ann Kaplan
DOODLIN’: IMPRESSIONS OF LEN LYE (1987) by Keith Griffiths
WATUNNA (1989) by Stacey Steers
JOSEPH CORNELL: WORLDS IN A BOX (1991) by Mark Stokes
Z (ZEE NOT ZED) (1993) by Saul Levine
ABSTRACT CINEMA (1993) by Keith Griffiths
CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL (aka ALFERD PACKER: THE MUSICAL) (1993) by Trey Parker
JONAS IN THE DESERT (1994) by Peter Sempel
AS IS WAS (1995) by Saul Levine
BRAKHAGE ON BRAKHAGE (1996) by Colin Still
BIRTH OF A NATION (1997) by Jonas Mekas
BRAKHAGE (1998) by Jim Shedden
I MET STAN BRAKHAGE (AT MOMA N.Y.C.) (1998) by Anja Czioska
KEEPERS OF THE FRAME (1999) by Mark McLaughlin
LOOKING AT FOREST OF BLISS (2000) by Robert Gardner
AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY (2000) by Jonas Mekas
JONAS AT THE OCEAN (2002) by Peter Sempel
VAKVAGANY (2002) by Benjamin Meade
IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN (2002) by Martina Kudlácek
ENCOMIUM (2003) by Bryan Frye
KEEPING AN EYE ON STAN (2003) by Ken Jacobs
A VISIT TO STAN BRAKHAGE (2003) by Pip Chodorov
NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN (2006) by Martina Kudlácek
A VISIT TO STAN BRAKHAGE (2006) by Jonas Mekas
FOR STAN (2009) by Marilyn Brakhage
FREE RADICALS: A HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM (2011) by Pip Chodorov
LIGHTSTRUCK 