High school theatrics [Stan Brakhage & Lawrence Jordan]

This isn’t remotely about film preservation, but I thought it might be a fun thing to put up regardless. I find it kind of touching too, and feel like this kind of ephemera is also really crucial in its way to a larger film archival/academic/curatorial context, even if superficially it may seem somewhat trivial.

In November of 2007 I visited Boulder and Denver to do a whole mess of stuff, although the primary reason for the trip was to spend some time with the Stan Brakhage papers, housed at CU Boulder. Aside from finding a lot of documents (particularly lab invoices) that would be extremely helpful to the restoration work on Stan’s films, there was also a lot of interesting ephemera related to Stan’s life and career. In some cases, I took snapshots of some of this material, even if not relevant to actual preservation work, usually because I found it interesting or helpful to filling in holes in what I knew about Stan’s biography during the early-to-mid-’50s in particular, a period of his life and work I’m very curious about.  Sometimes though, as with this item, it was just fun to encounter certain things.

A lot of folks who’ve studied experimental film know that Stan and filmmaker Lawrence Jordan went to high school together. Here’s an article from the school’s newspaper following a play they appeared in together. The school is South High, the paper was called (is still called?) The Confederate, and the date of this little article is February 21, 1951. That’s Lawrence on the left, and Stan in the middle: