This is a collection of writings by the giant of experimental cinema,
Stan Brakhage, that shows him in a completely new light, as part of
world cinema.
For the duration of the 1980s, Brakhage contributed to the Boulder
literary magazine Rolling Stock, mostly publishing reports from the
Telluride Film Festival. These reports show that Brakhage was keenly
interested in world cinema, anxious to meet and dialogue with filmmakers
of many different stripes.
The book also contains substantial discussion of Brakhage's work in
light of the filmmakers he encountered at Telluride and discussed in
Rolling Stock. Long chapters are given over to Soviet filmmakers such
as Andrei Tarkovsky, Larissa Shepitko, and Sergei Parajanov, as well as
the German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Brakhage was a keen viewer
of these filmmakers and their contemporaries, both at Telluride and in
his role as teacher at the University of Colorado, and Stan Brakhage
and Rolling Stock attempts to place his work alongside theirs and thus
reclaim him for world cinema.
The book's appendices reprint letters Brakhage wrote to Stella Pence
(Telluride's co-founder and managing director), as well as summaries of
his work for Telluride and a brace of difficult-to-find reviews.