Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man Show.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Brief Article - Interview

A legendary experimental filmmaker turns up on cable TV.

If you were channel surfing on November 17, 2000, you might have stumbled on a strange succession of images, edited at unfamiliar rhythms: the surface of the sun, the interior of the body, a man climbing a mountain to chop down a tree. You would have been watching Dog Star Man (1964), a much-revered but little-seen experimental film by the prolific director Stan Brakhage, being broadcast as part of the Sundance Channel's month-long salute to non-narrative filmmaking.

For half a century, Brakhage has made movies that alienate some audiences, transfix others, and leave others wobbling from one state to the other. Today, faced with climbing costs, he rarely uses film to photograph, instead painting and scratching directly onto celluloid. This comes, paradoxically, at a time when moviemaking is increasingly cheap for those who work with video and digital technologies. Another paradox: Though few theaters screen Brakhage and other experimental filmmakers today, their work is increasingly available on videotape, information about it is easily found online, and a commercial cable channel is willing to air it in prime time.

Brakhage lives in Boulder, where he teaches at the University of Colorado. I spoke with him in late November.

Q: Until recently, you wouldn't even license your work to be on videotape. Now it's on television.

A: I still don't care for video that much, but then I'm fortunate to have films to look at. So I'm spoiled, like someone who lives in a city with lots of museums who can see all the original oil paintings and watercolors. Video is getting good enough that it isn't fair for me to with-hold [my work] from people who have no other way to see it.

Q: With your kind of filmmaking getting more difficult and other forms of filmmaking becoming easier, is the art at large getting better or worse?

A: It's been my experience that if you can survive your greatest weaknesses and work despite them, there's an enormous strength that occurs. There was a time when film was relatively cheap and grants were easy to come by. I'm talking about the '50s, the '60s--you could live off people's garbage. There was a great surplus of goods.

There came to be excesses, just as now there is in video. One can pick up a video camera and run it any which way, it's so inexpensive--if you don't like it, just erase it. Whereas if you bring home a box of film, it's like a bag of jewels. So there comes to...