Stan Brakhage

This is a test of sorts.  So far, everything I’ve posted on this blog in terms of photos/information has been done with the permission of the filmmakers (in some cases, like with Robert Nelson, the permission is implicit).

Marilyn Brakhage and I talked several months ago about starting to put Stan Brakhage related material on this blog as well.

For some time, we’ve periodically talked about the idea of a major website with lots of info about Stan and all of his work, ever expanding, but that’s still a ways off. (By the way, if you’d be interested in volunteering your help on that hypothetical project, contact me through this blog. Can’t promise anything right now, but it’d be nice to gauge interest.)

In the meantime, Marilyn was OK with the idea of posting some stuff here, and I have tons of pictures and info I could share here, not that I want it to become an exclusively Brakhage blog or anything, but it’s still quite a lot of fascinating stuff. One particular thing we agreed on would be to watermark the photos somehow, just to keep them from being circulated without some kind of notice of copyright and provenance attached. Fair enough?

So I’ll give it a shot here today. In the following post on Brakhage’s Hell Spit Flexion (1983), I’ve put a lame, homemade watermark on the photo which will appear in the following post. Hopefully it’s not too annoying or intrusive. Please let me know if you have a better suggestion, I’m all ears. What do you think?

Also, when I step back a bit, and take a gander at this blog, I realize that it isn’t terribly specifically about film preservation, is it? It’s more about unique, weird, amazing, or anomalous findings in the course of my working on the preservation of (primarily) experimental films, frequently having to do with unique production practices.

So should I include more preservation information? Is anybody curious about that kind of stuff and would like more of it? I’m extremely open to suggestions.

Thanks for reading!