Stan Brakhage (January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an non-narrative filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the most important experimental filmmakers of the 20th century. He worked with various kinds of celluloid: 16mm, 8mm, 35mm, and IMAX, and was a practitioner of what he referred to as 'pure cinema'.
Regarded for decades as one of the monumental and iconic works of the historical American avant-garde, Stan Brakhage’s five-part Dog Star Man remains a defining and radically original work of independent cinema. Utilizing numerous inventive filmmaking techniques ranging from distortion lenses, multiple superimpositions, hyperkinetic editing, hand-painting, and even the physical collaging of materials onto the film strip, Dog Star Man employs a vividly subjective, hypnagogic vision following a mythic man’s ascent and struggle through the obstacles and vicissitudes of existence. Images of birth, death, nature, the cosmos, and the psyche gradually combine and coalesce over the course of the film’s 74 minutes with increasing intensity and complexity, resulting in a total cinematic experience that remains unique nearly sixty years after its initial making.
Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) is most well-known for the development, from the late 1950s onwards, of a cinema (he made over 450 films) in which the camera replaces the protagonist, freeing it from conventional positions and hence engagement with both subject and the viewer. His work is characterized by images where variations in exposure and focus, handheld camera movement, light flares, refractions and flashes are in a constant state of flux and interplay.
On November 4, 2001, the first session of Xcèntric took place, a regular program of screenings dedicated to experimental cinema and artists unpublished in the city of Barcelona. Just 20 years later, we celebrate the anniversary of Xcèntric with a set of screenings, performances and talks that make up a tribute to cinema as a collective experience, to the survival of the photochemical film and to the job of the projectionist, in addition to a necessary reflection on the present and the future of cinema in the digital age.
The impact of significant loss has exerted a powerful influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers. The Melancholy Lens offers a detailed look at biographical and psychological factors discernible in the art of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr with an aim toward a greater understanding of their work.
No other avant-garde filmmaker explored and celebrated the aesthetics of home movies with more fervor and complexity than Brakhage, most notably in his Songs, Sincerity, Nightmare, and Duplicity series. This program, selected by his wife Marilyn Brakhage, is a sampling of this work. Program 95 min.
Dates:
Friday, January 10, 2020 - 19:00 to Saturday, January 11, 2020 - 18:55
Every man remembers the first words of Neil Armstrong after stepping on the lunar surface, on July 20, 1969. Few remember, instead, those of his partner Buzz Aldrin: "Magnificent view. Magnificent desolation. " What did Aldrin see, where are these images, what was that desolation like? When it is 50 years since the Apollo 11 moon landing, Cineteca revisits the crossed paths of cinema, science and lunar exploration, and goes through the images with which cinema dreamed of the moon and outer space.
Avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage moved to New York in 1954, a stay which culminated in the seminal film Anticipation of the Night. Brakhage broke with the idea that film should record and tell a story acted out for the camera. Here, there is no on-screen protagonist; the protagonist is the director, the images on screen communicate his subjectivity. To do so, Brakhage developed an array of strategies and techniques, including fluid handheld camera movements, rapid editing, and the use of abstract imagery.
Dates:
Tuesday, May 28, 2019 - 19:00 to Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - 18:55
The special programme “Expanded Painlevé”, conceived with guest curator Federico Rossin, combines the films of Jean Painlevé, surrealist poet of wildlife, with those by filmmakers from the American and European avant-garde who have pursued different modes of openness to the animal world.
How does technology reproduce the mechanisms of vision? What questions arise from the intersections between capitalism, art, cinema, the mind, and neuroscience? What are the political, social, and philosophical consequences of the technological expansion and recreation of the visible? Who decides how we see and what we see? This following February at Cineteca Madrid we will explore the visual imaginaries produced by the technologies of cinema, art, performance, critical thinking, and virtual reality that amplify our ways of seeing and being in the world.
Dates:
Friday, February 1, 2019 (All day) to Saturday, February 2, 2019 (All day)
