The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein & Charles Olsen

by Elder, R. Bruce

• ISBN13: 9780889202757
• ISBN10: 0889202753
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-02-01
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ Pr

Summary

Since the late 1950s Stan Brakhage has been in the forefront of independent filmmaking. His body of work - some seventy hours - is one of the largest of any filmmaker in the history of cinema, and one of the most diverse. Probably the most widely quoted experimental filmmaker in history, his films typify the independent cinema.Until now, despite well-deserved acclaim, there has been no comprehensive study of Brakhage's oeuvre. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Traditionfills this void. R. Bruce Elder delineates the aesthetic parallels between Brakhage's films and a broad spectrum of American art from the 1920s through the 1960s.This book is certain to stir the passions of those interested in artistic critique and interpretation in its broadest terms.

Table of Contents

With Gratitude
Acknowledgments
Preface	p. 1
Four for America: Williams, Pound, Stein, Brakhage	p. 45
Styles of English Metre	p. 45
Meaning and Personal Being: Pound and Brakhage	p. 64
The Seachange: Or, How Pound Came "To Break the Pentameter"	p. 69
Bergson, Hulme, Pound, and Brakhage on the Body and Energy	p. 75
Experience as Energy: A Pattern for Thinking	p. 100
First-Person Singular: Bergson, Hulme, and Brakhage on the Primacy of Individuality	p. 146
Between Self and World: The Image in Hulme, Williams, Brakhage	p. 157
Writing = Composing Sound's Energies, Filmmaking = Composing Light's Energies: Gertrude Stein and Stan Brakhage's Conceptions of Their Media	p. 212
Digressive Interpolation: The Persistence of Emerson's Vision in Stein's Writing and Brakhage's Filmmaking	p. 228
Out of Stein: A Theory of Meaning for Stan Brakhage's Films	p. 240
The Paradox of a Perlocutionary Semantics: Brakhage and Stein on Artistic Meaning	p. 261
The Romanticism of Brakhage's Conception of Meaning	p. 295
The Conception of the Body in Open Form Poetics and Its Influence on Stan Brakhage's Filmmaking	p. 309
D. H. Lawrence and the Poetics of Energy	p. 309
Two Crucial Influences on Embodied Poetics: A. N. Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty	p. 313
A. N. Whitehead's Project: Reconciling Permanence and Flux	p. 325
Olson's Energetics of Embodied Existence	p. 348
Michael McClure's Poetics: The Body Is an Organism. The Universe Is an Organism. A Poem Embodies an Aspect of the Universe's Evolving Form	p. 423
Allen Ginsberg: The Breath, the Voice, and the Poem	p. 432
Action Painting as Performance	p. 442
Glossary	p. 453
Notes	p. 473
Selected Bibliography	p. 533
Stan Brakhage Filmography	p. 545
Index	p. 555
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.