Stan Brakhage Quotes

#1. My roommate at Yale University introduced me to the auteur theory of filmmaking. I soon became a big fan of the works of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, and Stan Brakhage. I then decided to make my own films!

Lloyd Kaufman

#2. I don't think American independent films have ever really been particularly experimental, except for the original guys from the '60s who were huge influences, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, and Stan van der Beek. They were the true independents.

Gus Van Sant

#3. Art is a sense of magic.

Stan Brakhage

#4. 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

#5. As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.

Theodore Bikel

#6. 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

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

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

#10. 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

#11. Amid so many problems, even grave, may we not lose our hope in the infinite mercy of God.

Pope Francis

#12. 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

#13. I like eating the right way, doing things the right way. I never had to have my dad come and say, 'Hey, you have to get back to the gym' or, 'Hey, you're eating wrong.'

Bryce Harper

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

Stan Brakhage

#15. 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

#16. I'm the most transparent secretary of state because of that. I've been willing to say, "OK, read them [emails] all."

Hillary Clinton

#17. He was keen to use English as well as French in daily conversation, writing letters in English and commissioning translations of French and Latin books.

Ian Mortimer

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

Stan Brakhage

#19. Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.

Julian Barnes

#20. The attitude of the American to the dollar contains poetry.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

#21. A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used.

David Gries

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

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

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

Stan Brakhage

#27. 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

#28. 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