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Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990

By Jerry White
Subjects Performing Arts, Film & Media
Series Film and Media Studies Hide Details
Hardcover : 9781771123037, 384 pages, April 2018
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781771123068, 384 pages, April 2018
View Table of Contents

Table of contents

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 Takes on Telluride:‘Straight’ European vs. New American”
Critical Interlude: Notes on the Films Brakhage Showed to Tarkovsky, 1983
Brakhage text 4 “Telluride Zinc”
Brakhage text 4.1 “Mailer Madness, Torn Macho”
Brakhage text 4.2 “Losey and Leigh”
Brakhage text 5 “Telluride Takes, Brakhage Talks”
Brakhage text 6 “Brakhage Observes: Telluride the 13th”
Brakhage text 7 “The Gold, the Bad & the Usual”
Chapter Two: A Certain Kind of Soviet: Brakhage, Parajanov and Shepitko
Conclusion
Epilogue: Pordenone, 2015
Appendices
Appendix A: Final Brakhage text: “International Cinema: The 12th Denver”
Appendix B: Blessings: Letters from Stan Brakhage
Appendix C: Ruby Rich: “Hitler: A Film From Germany: Is this a fascist film or an exposé of fascist filmmaking?”
Appendix D: A Stan Brakhage / Telluride filmography
Appendix E : A Stan Brakhage / Rolling Stock bibliography
Works Cited

Description

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 magazine Rolling 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 in Rolling 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-Jürgen 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, and Stan Brakhage and Rolling Stock attempts 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.

Reviews

A book of nooks and crannies, Brakhage in Rolling Stock is amply annotated both with notes and White's own essays. In addition to a bibliography and index, the back matter includes a selection of Brakhage's letters to the festival directors, a Telluride filmography, and B. Ruby Rich's prescient review of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), originally published in the L.A. Reader in 1980. White also cites a piece I wrote for American Film in 1983, bracketing Tarkovsky with Brakhage and Syberberg as conservative avant gardists, as an inspiration for his book. If so, I have been amply rewarded by the existence of this lively, eccentric volume

- J. Hoberman, Sight & Sound, 2018 November 1

Impressively informative, exceptionally well written, thoroughly 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation, Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock, 1980-1990 is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, community, and academic library Film & Media Studies collections in general, and Stan Brakhage supplemental studies reading lists in particular

- Carl Logan, Midwest Book Review