Brakhage´s Childhood
Brakhage´s Childhood
Brakhage´s Childhood
recounts the story of visionary American filmmaker Stan Brakhage´s (1933-2003) life up to age 12. In 1983 Stan and Jane Brakhage began a series of interviews wherein Stan described his life and Jane took notes. Each session yielded a chapter and each chapter usually a place. After each interview Jane organized, wrote and edited the stories. After two years they had 23 chapters in 100,000 words. "He had the most amazing memory I had ever encountered," says Jane, who writes: "This is a biography of a child, taken from the memory of that child grown up. I can only assume that we stopped the interviews, stopped the book, stopped the marriage, at exactly the right moment. Stan and I worked together a lot in his medium; this time, we worked together in my medium." "In the end," writes Tony Pipolo in the afterword, "[Jane] created a masterly fiction about a fiction that reveals undeniable truths, assuming an autobiographical posture at once commanding and equivocal, a chronicle of semi-Dickensian misery offset by plainspoken observations about an American childhood bearing the mark of its author´s writing style, demonstrated in books written during and after her life with Stan Brakhage."
Brakhage´s Childhood is a remarkable achievement conceptually, intellectually and aesthetically, and provides crucial insight into the early life of one of America´s most inspired and complex experimental filmmakers
recounts the story of visionary American filmmaker Stan Brakhage´s (1933-2003) life up to age 12. In 1983 Stan and Jane Brakhage began a series of interviews wherein Stan described his life and Jane took notes. Each session yielded a chapter and each chapter usually a place. After each interview Jane organized, wrote and edited the stories. After two years they had 23 chapters in 100,000 words. "He had the most amazing memory I had ever encountered," says Jane, who writes: "This is a biography of a child, taken from the memory of that child grown up. I can only assume that we stopped the interviews, stopped the book, stopped the marriage, at exactly the right moment. Stan and I worked together a lot in his medium; this time, we worked together in my medium." "In the end," writes Tony Pipolo in the afterword, "[Jane] created a masterly fiction about a fiction that reveals undeniable truths, assuming an autobiographical posture at once commanding and equivocal, a chronicle of semi-Dickensian misery offset by plainspoken observations about an American childhood bearing the mark of its author´s writing style, demonstrated in books written during and after her life with Stan Brakhage."
Brakhage´s Childhood is a remarkable achievement conceptually, intellectually and aesthetically, and provides crucial insight into the early life of one of America´s most inspired and complex experimental filmmakers
