Stan Brakhage Quotes & Sayings

The capacity to be intrinsic and vulgar is American. — Stan Brakhage

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever. — Stan Brakhage

Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium; and, as I honor that quality above all others at this time finding such a lack of it now elsewhere, I would simply like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world's greatest filmmaker - which is to say, simply: see his films! ... by all means/above all else ... etcetera. — Stan Brakhage

After wishing for years to be given-the-opportunity of filming some of the more 'mystical' occupations of our Times - some of the more obscure Public Figures which the average imagination turns into 'bogeymen' ... viz.: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.: - I was at last permitted to ride in a Pittsburgh police car, camera in hand, the final several days of September 1970. — Stan Brakhage

No one is out to get you. It's just that ... people are monkeys. — Stan Brakhage

What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black, — Stan Brakhage

Poetry is a totally different art than film. — Stan Brakhage

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get. — Stan Brakhage

I've always believed film is most close to music of all the other arts. — Stan Brakhage

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems. — Stan Brakhage

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "green"? — Stan Brakhage

I love being objected to. It worries me, but I love being objected to. — Stan Brakhage

A film fable so structured that all alchemical searchings are clearly filmwise (gold being discovered cinematically in each sequence ot mixed black-and-white and color) so that when the drama-discovery is actually made, it acts as a deliberate anti-climax of aesthetic perfection. — Stan Brakhage

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word. — Stan Brakhage

If only, then, I had been more living out of the present
such a beautiful word ... present. The sense of it being, now to me, more beautiful than 'to look forward. — Stan Brakhage

There are a lot of movies made for nobody. — Stan Brakhage

Artists are mostly shits of the worst order. You wouldn't want one living next door to you. Think about it: Vincent Van Gogh living next door, coming over to borrow your ear and a cup of sugar every morning-Good God! — Stan Brakhage

The video maker doesn't easily face a blank page. Because the videomaker can run it either any way, this way or the other way and erase it if they don't like it and so on. — Stan Brakhage

Art is a sense of magic. — Stan Brakhage

I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of picture - by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don't even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that. — Stan Brakhage

How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? — Stan Brakhage

It is just seeing-it is a very simple word-and to be a visionary is to be a seer. The problem is that most people can't see. — Stan Brakhage