Brakhage Center Newsletter - Winter 2024 newsletter
The Brakhage Center is delighted to be able to share information about upcoming events, which include a five-part series of experimental film screenings occurring biweekly and programmed by the Brakhage Center Artist-in-Residence, and Maya Deren programming in April, surrounding the visit by scholar, artist, and curator Mark Alice Durant.
From the cover of Mark Alice Durant’s book Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera. Mark will be giving a talk about his book, and the larger project of studying Deren during his visit on April 11.
This season has us continuing to build off of the successful Experimental Thursdays series the Center has established, this time to be curated by Sierra Grove. After Cody Norton wrapped up his 2023 residency in December (with an artist talk/screening and a small “art installation/”cabinet of curiosities” in the studio room to go along with an experimental film), he passed the reigns to Grove, who is in residence for 2024. During the residency, she is curating a five-part series of experimental film screenings, for which she is drawing on CU’s collection of 16mm prints.
One theme to be addressed in our community conversations is the nature (or natures) of the relationship between the work of female-identified filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Marie Menken on both Brakhage and other male-identified experimental filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century. The opening program for the series, titled Wondering Women, starts with Maya Deren’s glorious 1944 experimental film At Land followed by work by Geiser’s Babel Town (1992) and Menken’s Go Go Go (1964).
These events will be on Thursday afternoons; anticipate work by Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Phil Solomon and Janie Geiser, as well as, of course, Stan Brakhage (a painted film strip that is featured on this season’s poster).
Wondering Women happens on February 8. Then, please look forward to Dream Places (February 22), Space and Form (March 7), Light Beams (March 21), and Wonders of Night (April 4, with a cosmic thematic leading up to the total solar eclipse happening just a few days later).
Also this Spring, the Brakhage Center continues to build on the outcomes of Fall 2023’s Living Archive, Living Cinema: Processing the Work of Ken and Flo Jacobs symposium, which was co-organized with CU Moving Image Archivist Jaimie Wagner, and featured in-person participation by Tom Gunning, Andrew Lampert, various CU Boulder Film MFA students, the amazing staff member Casey Koehler, and remote engagements with independent filmmaker Azazel Jacobs and MOMA curator Josh Siegel. The Brakhage Center team is assembling documentation and also continuing the oral history work begun last fall with Ken and Flo, working towards future events and publication possibilities. Photographs are continually being posted on the Center website.
Image: Student participants in Living Archive, Living Cinema: Processing the Work of Ken and Flo Jacobs, at a lunchtime event to celebrate Ken Jacobs’ film “Keeping an Eye on Stan.” Sierra Grove, our 2024 Artist-in-Residence, pictured second from left. Sierra is curating this season’s experimental screening series. (Others pictured: Alejandra Saldivar, Mahda Purmehdi, and Dani Wasserman.)
Later in April, the Brakhage Center is hosting a series of events engaging with the art, life, and legacy of experimental filmmaker, dancer, and author Maya Deren. Screenings of her works will be accompanied by In the Mirror of Maya Deren, a multilayered documentary by Austrian filmmaker Martina Kudlácek, featuring interviews with Brakhage and many others.
Image: Film still from Maya Deren’s 1944 film At Land.
Scholar, artist and curator Mark Alice Durant, Professor of Photography at the University of Maryland, will be coming to present on his recently published and widely-reviewed Maya Deren: Choreographed for Camera in the afternoon and evening of April 11. Durant will give a public lecture and will also participate in the Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts undergraduate program through a visit to Professor Clark Farmer’s Film History class. There will also be separate opportunities for graduate students from throughout the Arts and Humanities on campus.