The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Bruce Elder, a filmmaker and critic, has written the first study of the
American experimental filmmaker, Stan Brakhage.

In his opening remarks, Elder pays tribute to Brakhage as a longtime
friend and mentor. From there he moves on to discuss, with a good deal
of scholarly detail, the major influences on Brakhage and his films
(including Henri Bergson, T.E. Hulme, William Carlos Williams, Ezra
Pound, and Gertrude Stein). “The conception of the body in open form
poetics and its influence on Stan Brakhage’s filmmaking” serves as
the overarching theme for an erudite discussion of some of the creative
artists and thinkers who influenced Brakhage’s “centrifugal”
vitality in filmmaking (D.H. Lawrence, Alfred North Whitehead, and
Maurice Merleau Ponty, among others). Elder also compares Brakhage’s
thinking and creative processes with those of Michael McLure and Allen
Ginsberg.

This challenging and important work demands the attention of film
historians, scholars, critics, theoreticians, and media and culture
commentators. In addition to a select bibliography, there is a glossary,
a filmography, and 58 pages of notes.