Stan Brakhage: Metaphors on Vision
Presented in association with San Francisco Cinematheque & Canyon Cinema Foundation
Light Industry's Thomas Beard in person
Friday, December 8th, 2017 @ 7:30pm
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission Street, SF, CA)
$10 / $6 for SF Cinematheque members (advance tickets here)
from San Francisco Cinematheque:
"Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'"
-Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision
First published in 1963, Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision remains one of the most challenging and inspiring artistic statements of avant-garde cinema by one of its most influential figures, a treatise on mythopoeia and the nature of visual experience written in a style as idiosyncratic as his art. Long out of print and highly collectible, Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry proudly announce the republication of a new definitive edition of Metaphors, featuring a full facsimile of the original 1963 design by George Maciunas and copious annotations by P. Adams Sitney (as well as the inclusion of Sitney’s 1998 introduction to the 1998 French translation). Light Industry’s Thomas Beard appears in person to present and discuss the book and to present Brakhage’s 1959 masterpiece Anticipation of the Night along with Brakhage's The Dead (1960) and the camera-less classic Mothlight (1963).
Copies of Metaphors on Vision will be available at the screening and are also available from Cinematheque’s online bookstore.