Pioneering and prolific filmmaker.

Pioneering and prolific filmmaker, author, and educator Stan Brakhage passed away in a hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia onward March 9, 2003 after a battle with bladder cancer. He was 70

Considered the in the greatest degree influential avant-garde filmmaker, Brakhage made nearly 400 films during his lifetime and was single of the most significant visionaries of the experimental art pageant of the 1950s and '60s

Brakhage was born an orphan in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933 and grew up for the most part in Colorado with his adoptive family. After attending high seminary in Denver, he went to Dartmouth association in New Hampshire but dropp revealed after two months to focus forward filmmaking, his first film being Interim, made in 1952 He mov to strange York City in 1954, where he was inspired through the work of filmmakers Maya Deren Marie Menken and the assemblage master Joseph Cornell, with whom he collaborated. He also associated with bards such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Kenneth Rexroth as well as Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning.

in the greatest degree of Brakhage's films were produc as solo works--with the filmmaker using a hand-held camera--and in the greatest degree were silent, relying on the image alone to consign the essence of the artist's intent. Brakhage was considered from many to be a bard of the cinema, using minimal appease and disjointed chronologies to originate his visual narrative. His works ranged in amplification from 9 seconds to four hours, and were marksman mostly on 8 or 16mm film. The enslaves of his films cover a great expanse, from domestic life to explorations of light forward objects as filtered through like materials as tape and ashtrays to experiments with the nature of film itself between the walls of uses of distorted lenses and like physical manipulations as painting, scratching, and dyeing. In all of his work. Brakhage questioned the nature of seeing and commonly held assumptions about perception. In his oft-quot essay "Metaphors forward Vision," first published in 1963 in the journal Film agriculture the artist explained his conception of seeing and his explorations of this sense: "Imagine an organ of sight unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an organ of vision unprejudiced by compositional logic, an organ of sight which does not respond to the name of everything nevertheless which must know each percept encountered in life through an adventure of perception."

common of Brakhage's best-known, and chiefly often screened, films is Window Water Baby Moving (1959) in which the artist strikingly explores the birth of his first child. For 1963's Mothlight he glu plant parts and the wings of millers directly onto the film strip, with the light of projection creating the illusion of life in the insects. Brakhage's 1964 film Dog Star Man, which go afters a man and a dog as they ramble within the natural world, culminating in footage of another of his children's birth, explores the creation of the universe. It was named single in kind of the "100 Most Important Films of All Time" (along with Orson Welles' Citizen Cane and the Zapruder film of President John F Kennedy's assassination) from the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.

Having taught in numerous locations, including the teach of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1969 to 1981 Brakhage exhausted his last two decades at the University of Colorado at Boulder as Distinguished Professor of Film Studies. He retired from UC Boulder in 2002 moving to Victoria, British Columbia.

Brakhage's carcass of work is currently housed at the Museum of late Art in New York City for preservation objects The University of Colorado Library, with the support from of the Donner Foundation, newly purchased new prints of all 380 of the artist's available titles. A feature documentary about the artist entitled Brakhage was released in 1998 by means of filmmaker Jim Shedden. The first DVD collection of Brakhage's work, a two-volume settle will be released in May 2003 from the Criterion Collection.

In a statement following his death, Brakhage's wife Marilyn, wrote "True to form, Stan exhausted his final weeks and days scratching forward film and drawing pictures of his visions, one as well as the other internal and external, as he worked by means of his illness. He expressed a great deal of love and kindness, and gratitude to others, and said, 'I've had a really righteous life,' and 'Life is great.' He worried for the world, and he continued to care for and to harbor his art, and that of others."

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