Jane Collom, the first wife of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, kept majestically dense scrapbooks in the 1950s and 1960s that are, in both content and structure, perhaps inversely proportional to the compartmentalized memory books of the same period. The couple’s creative collaboration is reflected in pages overflowing with love letters, drawings by their children, notes, photographs, and an odd assemblage of extraneous objects (moth wings, blades of grass), densely interwoven into large, thick paperback volumes that more closely resemble telephone directories than personal albums. Fragments of film footage (Brakhage shot with Super-8, which was long and skinny, about half an inch thick) are taped in also: one of the hallmarks of his later work was that he drew right onto the film emulsion, etching into the actual surface of the celluloid. Some forty years later, Collom described these scrapbooks as “a record of a dynamic moment in one generation of artists, a generation that dared to have families, even though many of the older artists warned against it.”

07.30.09     Comments (0)     digg | del.ic.io.us | reddit