AD HOC #96: Brakhage + Rarities

With Jim Shedden and Alexa-Frances Shaw in person!

Stan Brakhage spent more than fifty years testing what could be made visible in cinema. His work moved from the psychodramatic forms of the 1950s toward an increasingly direct concentration on perception: handheld camera movement, rapid montage, superimposition, negative image, and scratching and painting on the film strip, a form he came to call ‘moving visual thinking’. His films would discover equivalents for forms of vision ordinarily excluded from representation.

Ad Hoc presents these three films alongside Jim Shedden and Alexa-Frances Shaw’s documentary Brakhage. Drawing on interviews with Brakhage, his family, friends, colleagues and critics, archival footage, and excerpts from films spanning his career, the documentary offers an unusually intimate record of a filmmaker whose ideas about cinema were inseparable from the circumstances of his life. Shedden and Shaw made the film in the late 1990s, with an original score by Brakhage’s longtime friend and collaborator James Tenney.

AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.

AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.

Thanks to Alberto Zambenedetti, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, Karen Reid, Eyan Logan, Robert Trevisan, and the audio-visual staff of Innis College.

Programme:
Brakhage (directed by Jim Shedden, produced and edited by Alexa-Frances Shaw, 1998/99)
Cannot Exist (Stan Brakhage with Sam Bush, 1994)
Through Wounded Eyes (Stan Brakhage with Joel Haertling, 1996)