Stan Brakhage famous quotes

04-29-2025

Art is a sense of magic.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Art #Magic #Art Is
The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Hollywood #Kind #Film
How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?
-- Stan Brakhage

#Baby #Color #Green
A film fable so structured that all alchemical searchings are clearly filmwise (gold being discovered cinematically in each sequence ot mixed black-and-white and color) so that when the drama-discovery is actually made, it acts as a deliberate anti-climax of aesthetic perfection.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Drama #Black And White #Discovery
I've always believed film is most close to music of all the other arts.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Art #Film #Always Believe
Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium; and, as I honor that quality above all others at this time finding such a lack of it now elsewhere, I would simply like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world's greatest filmmaker - which is to say, simply: see his films!...by all means/above all else...etcetera.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Mean #Honor #Quality
The capacity to be intrinsic and vulgar is American.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Capacity #Vulgar
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. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of â€˜Green?â€™ How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?
-- Stan Brakhage

#Baby #Adventure #Eye
The video maker doesn't easily face a blank page. Because the videomaker can run it either any way, this way or the other way and erase it if they don't like it and so on.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Running #Video #Pages
Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Alive #World #Movement
We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Way #Foundation #Prove It
There are a lot of movies made for nobody.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Movie #Made
Poetry is a totally different art than film.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Art #Different #Film
Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Forever #Sides #Novelists
What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black,
-- Stan Brakhage

#White #Black #Might
After wishing for years to be given-the-opportunity of filming some of the more 'mystical' occupations of our Times - some of the more obscure Public Figures which the average imagination turns into 'bogeymen'... viz.: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.: - I was at last permitted to ride in a Pittsburgh police car, camera in hand, the final several days of September 1970.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Opportunity #Doctors #Average
If only, then, I had been more living out of the present--such a beautiful word...present. The sense of it being, now to me, more beautiful than 'to look forward.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Beautiful #Looks
It is just seeing-it is a very simple word-and to be a visionary is to be a seer. The problem is that most people can't see.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Simple #People #Visionaries
I love being objected to. It worries me, but I love being objected to.
-- Stan Brakhage

#Love Is #Worry

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