Stan Brakhage Quotes

#1. How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?

Stan Brakhage

#2. 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

#3. The capacity to be intrinsic and vulgar is American.

Stan Brakhage

#4. There are a lot of movies made for nobody.

Stan Brakhage

#5. Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

Stan Brakhage

#6. No one is out to get you. It's just that ... people are monkeys.

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

#8. Poetry is a totally different art than film.

Stan Brakhage

#9. 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!

Stan Brakhage

#10. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "green"?

Stan Brakhage

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Art is a sense of magic.

Stan Brakhage