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Stan Brakhage: Micro-Garden and Love Songs
The last decade has seen an indescribably rich outpouring of hand-painted film from Stan Brakhage and in this programme, he will present a selection of his most stunning recent work. In this latest work, he establishes himself at the summit of hand painting on film and, though it is rarely acknowledged, he is one of the most significant painters of our age.From the very beginning of his career, Brakhage applied his hand to distressing film, to scratching and painting on its surface, but at this point in time, it seems to be his primary calling. Brakhage’s photographed films, extremely tactile, sensuous, responsive to immediate sensation, have camera movements that are often likened to ‘brushstrokes’. The act of painting directly on film has taken these qualities into a new and different dimension. He has moved into a further control of frame by frame printing, translucent overlapping space, compound colourations, intricate variations of tempi and a more pronounced emphasis on the structuring of cinematic event and that which he refers to as moving visual thinking. Though many painters from Turner and Nolde to De Kooning and Joan Mitchell continue to inspire him, Brakhage’s work is completely evolved and distinctive and in essence profoundly cinematic.Brakhage’s unique painted-film vocabulary sometimes remains as abstractly interior and true to his internal subjective vision while simultaneously evoking natural elemental forms – vitreous, igneous, molten, floral, crystalline, celestial.