Film

• Birth, Sex, Death & The Search For God
• I wanted to make a poem
• Metaphors on Vision
• The Myth of The Mountain Man
• Robert Creeley on Stan Brakhage

In 1996, when I was in Boulder, Colorado, working on my film on Allen Ginsberg, I got to meet the avant-garde film-maker Stan Brakhage, whose work I’d known & admired for many years. We struck up something of a friendship, & Stan, who was being treated for bladder cancer, agreed to let me film a series of daily interviews in which he discussed in some detail his life, working procedures & aesthetics. This project, which was continued in March 1997 & amounted to more than ten hours of footage, was planned to be the core of a documentary which, sadly, was never completed, though excerpts from it were used as director’s commentary on the boxed DVD set By Brakhage, released by the Criterion Collection.

In 2019 the project was revised, with the solid & enthusiastic support of Stan’s widow, Marilyn. The film now runs to a little over 90 minutes & includes excerpts from twenty or so of Stan’s films. Entitled ‘Brakhage on Brakhage’, my hope is to see it released commercially in the coming months.