Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990 [Hardcover]

This is a collection of writings by the giant of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage, that shows him in a completely new light, as part of world cinema. For the duration of the 1980s, Brakhage contributed to the Boulder literary magazineRolling Stock, mostly publishing reports from the Telluride Film Festival. These reports show that Brakhage was keenly interested in world cinema, anxious to meet and dialogue with filmmakers of many different stripes.

The book also contains substantial discussion of Brakhage's work in light of the filmmakers he encountered at Telluride and discussed inRolling Stock. Long chapters are given over to Soviet filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Larissa Shepitko, and Sergei Parajanov, as well as the German filmmaker Hans-J?rgen Syberberg. Brakhage was a keen viewer of these filmmakers and their contemporaries, both at Telluride and in his role as teacher at the University of Colorado, andStan Brakhage and Rolling Stockattempts to place his work alongside theirs and thus reclaim him for world cinema.

The book's appendices reprint letters Brakhage wrote to Stella Pence (Telluride's co-founder and managing director), as well as summaries of his work for Telluride and a brace of difficult-to-find reviews.

Both a heavily annotated collection of the reports Stan Brakhage did on the Telluride Film Festival for the magazineRolling Stockand an analysis of his work that attempts to place his singular corpus in the context of world cinema, that is to say, alongside those filmmakers he was encountering in that mountain town.Preface by Linda Williams

Introduction

Chapter One: A Conservative Avant-garde: Brakhage, Tarkovsky and Syberberg

Stan Brakhage Texts

Brakhage text 1 Closely Watched Blurs

Brakhage text 2 Brakhage at the Ninth Telluride

Brakhage text 3 Telluride Gold: Brakhage Meets Tarkovsky

Brakhage text 3.1 Short Takl32