Since the late 1950s Stan Brakhage has been in the forefront of independent filmmaking. His body of work — some seventy hours — is one of the largest of any filmmaker in the history of cinema, and one of the most diverse. Probably the most widely quoted experimental filmmaker in history, his films typify the independent cinema.

Until now, despite well-deserved acclaim, there has been no comprehensive study of Brakhage’s oeuvre. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition fills this void. R. Bruce Elder delineates the aesthetic parallels between Brakhage’s films and a broad spectrum of American art from the 1920s through the 1960s.

This book is certain to stir the passions of those interested in artistic critique and interpretation in its broadest terms.

Contributor: R. Bruce Elder R. Bruce Elder is an award-winning filmmaker and teaches media at Ryerson University. His book Harmony & Dissent (WLU Press, 2008) received the prestigious Robert Motherwell Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Rudolf Kuenzli described DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (WLU Press, 2013) as “that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light.”

"Elder evidences a brilliant command of Brakhage's immense filmography and a lifetime's engagement with the poets he discusses....In every reading there are traces of the lessons Brakhage's cinema can offer to open-minded an open-eyed artists. In fact, The films of Stan Brakhage is less an academic study than the enthusiastic and fully committed response of one filmmaker to another and to the modernist tradition they both share." --- "In R. Bruce Elder's The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson, the link between Brakhage and the great poetic voices of the 20th century is persuasively established....Elder's greatest accomplishment in this book is his ability to interweave varying disciplines so that the reader becomes acutely aware of the points of intersection between media. Despite its wide-ranging topic, The Films of Stan Brakhage is meticulously researched, remarkably lucid, and provides a compelling argument for Brakhage's place alongside these great thinkers of the 20th century." --- "This challenging and important work demands the attention of film historians, scholars, critics, theoreticians, and media and culture commentators. In addition to a select bibliography, there is a glossary, a filmography, and 58 pages of notes."