Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker

Throughout a career spanning half a century, Stan Brakhage, the foremost experimental filmmaker in America, and perhaps the world, wrote controversial essays on the art of film and its intersections with poetry, music, dance, and painting. Published in small circulation literary and arts journals, they were gathered later into such books as Metaphors on Vision and Film at Wit's End. Beginning in 1989, and for a decade thereafter, Brakhage wrote the essays in Telling Time as an occasional column for Musicworks, a Toronto quarterly. Ostensibly about the relation of film to music, they soon enlarged to explore primary concerns beyond film, including Brakhage's aesthetic theories based on the phenomenology of human cognition. In these essays he is as brilliant discussing Gertrude Stein or romantic love as he is on child psychology, astronomy, and physiology, all the while teasing out vital correspondences between the arts, and upending conventional ideas of how we perceive. His investigations of other artists are models of sympathetic intuition and generosity. Above all, he shares his theories, discoveries and understandings in the spirit of establishing a groundwork for many varieties of human liberation. His prose is filled with flashes of insight, elaborated metaphors, playful elisions, shorthand puns and neologisms, personal digressions, surprising epiphanies, leaps of faith, affronts to authority. He appeals to the imagination, and invites us to a more profound and personal experience of art.

Stan Brakhage was one of the most influential of independent American filmmakers. From 1952 to 2003 he issued nearly 400 original films, ranging in length from a few seconds to several hours. Among his best known film works are “Dog Star Man,” “The Act of Seeing with one's own eyes,” and “The Dante Quartet.” His many books on film include Metaphors on Vision (Anthology Film Archives, 1963), Film Biographies (Turtle Island, 1977) and Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings, 1964 - 1980 (Documentext, 1982). The recipient of many awards and prizes, including the 1986 Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute and the 1989 MacDowell Colony Medal, Brakhage was also a professor of film studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. An artist of prodigous energy and unflagging genius, Stan Brakhage died on March 9, 2003.