Celluloid hero: P. Adams Sitney on Stan Brakhage - Passages - Obituary

ArtForum, Sept, 2003 by P. Adams Sitney

Brakhage had a dramatic presence, with mesmerizing eyes and a powerful voice. An incorrigible mythomane, he told fabulous, seductive tales and obsessively made his agonies, his humor, his confessions, his spellbinding accounts of the lives and work of other artists, his startling poetic expressions the center of all attention. The mythomania was contagious; those who knew him perpetuated it.

As charismatic and attractive as he was in his generous moods, he was terrible in his outbursts of volcanic temper. He firmly believed that his creativity was a state, like possession, that came over him, a trance in which he was servant of a Muse. And he treated his explosive anger as his creativity's divine counterpart, or "holy rage," as he called it. Most of his friends learned to negotiate these tempers, but I failed. I had been very close to him from the time we met, when I was sixteen and he twenty-eight. But after nine years I could no longer bear the rages, which seemed to increase in vehemence. After an outburst in 1969, we never spoke or met again, although he made overtures every few years. Finally, almost thirty years later, he wrote me a note of thanks for the effusive account of his importance I had given in Jim Shedden's documentary Brakhage (1998), and then we exchanged letters every few months. His last arrived a week after his death. It was a moving valediction that he had dictated to Marilyn in the hospital.

He weathered the fluctuations of his reputation, but he chronically suffered from insufficient financial support to keep filming, print finished films, and preserve older ones. In the '70s and '80s he came under attack from Lacanians for his insistence on a mode of vision beyond language, from feminists for his celebration of the nuclear family, from Marxists for his Emersonian doctrine of self-reliance. His appetite for fierce polemical controversy exacerbated the attacks. In the '90s his audience returned and spread to Paris, London, and Tokyo; a new generation of filmmakers and viewers discovered the richness of his oeuvre, and they found in his public appearances and personal exchanges with them the patient, tolerant, and generous artist Stan Brakhage had become.

P. Adams Sitney is professor of visual arts at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2002).