Stan Brakhage Quotes

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.

Art is a sense of magic.

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.

The capacity to be intrinsic and vulgar is American.

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.

Artists are mostly shits of the worst order. You wouldn't want one living next door to you. Think about it: Vincent Van Gogh living next door, coming over to borrow your ear and a cup of sugar every morning-Good God!

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 ‘Green?’ How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?

There are a lot of movies made for nobody.

I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of picture - by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don't even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

I love being objected to. It worries me, but I love being objected to.

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

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.

What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black.

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of '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.

I've always believed film is most close to music of all the other arts.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

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.

Poetry is a totally different art than film.

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.