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October 22, 2023

Brakhage DVDs

I'm obviously behind the curve on this one, but Fred Camper is working on a two-disc package from Criterion collecting Stan Brakhage films. I can't say enough about how fucking great this is. Brakhage has been interviewed at length by Bruce Kawin, who teaches with him at CU — Boulder and who has been trying to get this project off the ground since the days of laserdisc.

Not too much to say about movies, since I was in a car wreck and haven't been able to drive for the last few weeks. I did manage to see Punch-Drunk Love and The Ring, and while I wasn't crazy about either of them I guess I'd give the former a lowercase pro and the latter a mixed. Reviews coming soon ... or not, depending on how my week goes. I'm reviewing Sony's new DVD burner for a video production magazine, and I'm struggling to get DVD-legal video files into my ancient-by-tech-geek standards PC. I spent the weekend rebuilding Windows after a disaster initiated by my innocent attempt to install some Veritas DVD-writing software, sheesh. Dying to see both Bowling for Columbine and, especially, Jackass: The Movie. The boy jus' can't help it.

Posted by Bryant at October 22, 2023 10:25 PM

Comments

According to Robert Harris (article here), this is a March 2003 release, and will include Mothlight--the most memorable film of his that I've seen. I'm pretty excited, but those who buy the dvds must remember that in the case of Brakhage's films (perhaps no more so than with any good film), dvd is no substitute for sitting in a theater and watching the film projected. To me, half of the experience of watching mothlight is having the print itself passed around the audience, so that I can see how the images look on the film itself.

Posted by: Jun-Dai Bates-Kobashigawa at November 18, 2023 04:04 PM

Yes, of course you're right. I was a frequent attendee of Brakhage screenings when I lived in Boulder, and one of my best film-school memories was of sitting in the man's office and looking at film clips from a huge drawer that he had just full of 'em. He showed me some of the hand-painted frames from Night Music, which was commissioned (and then never exhibited) by the Imax people. Just wonderful.

But there are key Brakhage films that I have not seen to this day, and I'll certainly appreciate the idea to watch and study them, and it just seems like such a cool thing to be able to go through these movies on DVD and examine them frame by frame. Sure, that's never how they were intended to be seen, but I imagine that Brakhage himself would be very patient with people's desire to look at them this way.

-bf-

Posted by: Bryant at December 3, 2023 11:43 PM

At the bottom of the upcoming features page of Fantoma's web site (link here), there is mention of a dvd entitled "The Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume 1." I watched Whity and Fando & Lis, and was pretty impressed with the work that Fantoma did on those titles (though in the case of Whity, I was not so impressed with the film itself). I haven't seen anything that they've put out since, but hopefully they'll do a good job on the Anger dvd and include a nice selection of his films.

Posted by: Jun-Dai Bates-Kobashigawa at December 12, 2023 07:08 PM

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