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

My roommate at Yale University introduced me to the auteur theory of filmmaking. I soon became a big fan of the works of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, and Stan Brakhage. I then decided to make my own films! — Lloyd Kaufman

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

I hope, that in the days, and weeks, and years to come, the question of where the dividing lines between adult and children's fiction really are, and why they blur so, and whether we truly need them - and who, ultimately, books are for - will rise up in your mind when you least expect it to, and vex you, as you also are unable, in an entirely satisfactory manner, to answer it. — Neil Gaiman

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

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

Some day I would like to write a textbook on how to be a female detective in a man's world. Rule Number One: try not to let your animosity show. Your career as an investigator will be short lived if you cannot hide your feelings when you dislike, distrust, or despise your interviewee. — Frances Brody

We can't buy cereal with marshmallows because it makes my poop blue. — Adrienne Wilder

True friendhip is like sound health: the value of it is seldom know until it is lost. — Charles Caleb Colton

The smaller man said again, 'See the Buddha in everyone.'
How different, I thought, that is from Brakhage, who says it is the artist's business to discover the particularity that distinguishes you from all others. Your virtue. Your vision that makes you separate from others. I remembered that he quoted Robert Duncan. 'Soul is not universal. It is a created-creative event. — Sharon Doubiago

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

In terms of characters I wish I had created - just because I haven't dealt with anything like them - I'm really impressed by characters who can endure over time, whether that be a long series run like a Harry Bosch, or a character who endures over generations and continues to please readers: Sherlock Holmes. — Michael Koryta

Thereby gain much leisure, and save much trouble, and therefore at every action a man must privately by way of admonition suggest unto himself, What? may not this that now I go about, — Marcus Aurelius

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

Tinsley hated the thought of people greeting her with "Where's Julian?" It was like once you were a couple, you ceased to exist as an individual. It made her a little sick to her stomach. — Cecily Von Ziegesar

I don't think American independent films have ever really been particularly experimental, except for the original guys from the '60s who were huge influences, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, and Stan van der Beek. They were the true independents. — Gus Van Sant

I've seen people who don't have deals get features from people that labels can't even get features from, because you gotta show face and be in-tune with these guys who still have that independent mind set as far how you hustle yourself. Because they only really care at the end of the day about the dollas. — Kid Ink

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

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

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

I've always acted; in fact, I can't remember a time when I was not. When I was little, cinema was a game, then my father's job and now mine. — Sonam Kapoor

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

Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr. Casaubon's aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage - of Will Ladislaw's grandmother. Dorothea could fancy that it was alive now - the delicate woman's face which yet had a headstrong look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience Dorothea seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature! She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it. Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage. — George Eliot

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