Obituary: Stan Brakhage (1933-2002).

Pioneering and prolific filmmaker, author, and educator Stan Brakhage passed away in a hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia on March 9, 2003 after a battle with bladder cancer. He was 70.

Considered the most influential avant-garde filmmaker, Brakhage made nearly 400 films during his lifetime and was one of the most significant visionaries of the experimental art scene of the 1950s and '60s.

Brakhage was born an orphan in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933, and grew up mostly in Colorado with his adoptive family. After attending high school in Denver, he went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire but dropped out after two months to focus on filmmaking, his first film being Interim, made in 1952. He moved to New York City in 1954, where he was inspired by the work of filmmakers Maya Deren, Marie Menken, and the assemblage master Joseph Cornell, with whom he collaborated. He also associated with poets such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Kenneth Rexroth as well as Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning.

Most of Brakhage's films were produced as solo works--with the filmmaker using a hand-held camera--and most were silent, relying on the image alone to convey the essence of the artist's intent. Brakhage was considered by many to be a poet of the cinema, using minimal content and disjointed chronologies to construct his visual narrative. His works ranged in length from 9 seconds to four hours, and were shot mostly on 8 or 16mm film. The subjects of his films cover a great expanse, from domestic life to explorations of light on objects as filtered through such materials as tape and ashtrays to experiments with the nature of film itself through uses of distorted lenses and such physical manipulations as painting, scratching, and dyeing. In all of his work. Brakhage questioned the nature of seeing and commonly held assumptions about perception. In his oft-quoted essay "Metaphors on Vision," first published in 1963 in the journal Film Culture, the artist explained his concept of seeing and his explorations of this sense: "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."

One of Brakhage's best-known, and most often screened, films is Window Water Baby Moving (1959), in which the artist strikingly explores the birth of his first child. For 1963's Mothlight he glued plant parts and the wings of moths directly onto the film strip, with the light of projection creating the illusion of life in the insects. Brakhage's 1964 film Dog Star Man, which follows a man and a dog as they ramble through the natural world, culminating in footage of another of his children's birth, explores the creation of the universe. It was named one of the "100 Most Important Films of All Time" (along with Orson Welles' Citizen Cane and the Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy's assassination) by the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.

Having taught in numerous locations, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1969 to 1981, Brakhage spent his last two decades at the University of Colorado at Boulder as Distinguished Professor of Film Studies. He retired from UC Boulder in 2002, moving to Victoria, British Columbia.

Brakhage's body of work is currently housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for preservation purposes. The University of Colorado Library, with the support from of the Donner Foundation, recently purchased new prints of all 380 of the artist's available titles. A feature documentary about the artist entitled Brakhage was released in 1998 by filmmaker Jim Shedden. The first DVD collection of Brakhage's work, a two-volume set, will be released in May 2003 by the Criterion Collection.

In a statement following his death, Brakhage's wife Marilyn, wrote. "True to form, Stan spent his final weeks and days scratching on film and drawing pictures of his visions, both internal and external, as he worked through his illness. He expressed much love and kindness, and gratitude to others, and said, 'I've had a really good life,' and 'Life is great.' He worried for the world, and he continued to care for and to protect his art, and that of others."