NMED 3850
Experimental Film Production
NMED 3850
Today’s Class…
How to Write
An Artist Statement
Brakhage
NMED 3850
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Course Outline Correction
Artist Statement Assignment
5%
Students will be required to write, edit and submit an artist statement of
200-300 words which offers insight into creative intention and most
importantly critical context for the approach to experimental
composition.
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Due September 15th
NMED 3850
• Artist Statement
• Is intended to give an artist’s audience insight into his
or her creative intent and to provide some context for
the reading of the work.
• It is different from a bio.
NMED 3850
• Artist Statement
• You MUST:
1. Accept that you are an artist
2. Write in the third person
3. Choose your words
• Consider non-cinematic forms of art and artists that inform your
choices as an artist.
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There may be art forms that inspire you
There may be art forms to which you feel compelled to respond
What do you feel passionately about in the world?
What memories or experiences help to form your interests as an artist?
• Articulate the method in your “experimental madness”
NMED 3850
• Stan Brakhage (January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was
an American non-narrative filmmaker. He is one of the best, if
not the best known and most important of avant-garde
filmmakers. He is regarded as one of the most important
experimental filmmakers of the 20th century. He produced over
400 films in his lifetime.
• Brakhage's films are usually silent and lack a traditional
narrative, being more analogous to visual poetry than to prose
story-telling. He often referred to them as "visual music" or
"moving visual thinking." His films range in length from just a few
seconds to several hours, but most last between two or three
minutes and one hour. He frequently hand-painted the film or
scratched the image directly into the film emulsion, and
sometimes used collage techniques.
NMED 3850
• Stan Brakhage
• Brakhage's great subject was light itself.
• His great desire was to make cinema equal to the other arts by
using that which was uniquely cinematic — by organizing light in
the time and space of the projected image — in a way that
would be worthy, structurally and aesthetically, of the poetry,
painting, and music that most inspired him.
• Brakhage was meticulous in the organization of the detail of his
work. The intricacy with which he used composition and color
and texture and rhythm, resulted in films that virtually demand
multiple viewings.
NMED 3850
• Watch Brakhage and take notes…don’t just
listen. Take notes about:
– what defines experimental film to those
interviewed
– Brakhage’s techniques
– Brakhage’s social commentary (i.e. politics
and art)
– how the artist describes what he does in
his own words