“He noticed everything,” says Mimi Brav of Stan Brakhage, the world-renowned avant-garde filmmaker who died last month. Brav met him in 1972, when he was lecturing at the School of the Art Institute. “I was very young,” she says. “I had never experienced anyone with the degree of sensitivity he had. He would see a thousand things within a few blocks, pointing out every bit of Louis Sullivan architecture, the features of people on the street and the way they moved, the light in the sky, sounds you wouldn’t be that conscious of. ‘I wear my nerve endings on my sleeve,’ he used to say. He would sometimes wear a Walkman because he needed to hear classical music or else he would become overwhelmed by the noises of the city.”
Brakhage was beset by physical ailments throughout his life. “There was a whole year in Chicago where he could only eat certain foods,” Brav says. “He had asthma from when he was a child and was always afraid of asthma attacks, but he would also say, ‘Maybe I need this sickness to make these films.’ He felt like the arts came because people are fractured by life–he used to say that the creative process begins where everything is lost. He did have a feeling of being alien to the planet, alien to who he was–a crazy bundle of nerves who didn’t feel at home here.” But he had a playful side too: “Once he took Christopher and me to a photo booth in Greek Town, and he played the director of the snapshots.”
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Brand had been drawn to the school in part because Brakhage’s eight-millimeter “Songs” were among the first avant-garde films he’d seen.”They were beautiful and immediate, and I realized that I had available to me the same tools he had used,” he says. “I had bought an eight-millimeter camera for $10 and shot film, trying to learn how to see and how to make images. Stan was a very compelling speaker, very passionate. His lectures tended to be anecdotal–his emphasis was on the individual maker and individual vision, and that was consistent with his work. I sat next to him on a flight to Chicago once, and I remember him showing me how to press my eyelids and identify various shapes and flares. I was impressed by the strength of his conviction, the tenacity of his working habits, his intellectual curiosity.”
Danielson goes on: “Brakhage’s work said, ‘Look, it’s all interesting. Every single thing that you want to pick out to spend time on can open up your world for you. You just have to want it to happen and be willing to spend the time and be willing to solve the riddle that’s troubling you and be willing to accept that it’s going to trouble you in the process of solving it too. He always was so deeply engaged with life that there was never anything that was ephemeral and unimportant to him. He quoted [filmmaker and poet] James Broughton that the reasons angels can fly is that they take themselves lightly. But Stan didn’t take himself lightly. He took Broughton seriously. Stan always said that if a film wasn’t ambiguous at the beginning he had failed.”
