Description: max goldberg writing on film
A friend recently asked about something I wrote on Stan Brakhage and Guy Davenport’s friendship, a piece that largely exists largely to quote Davenport’s exuberant letter to Hugh Kenner on first encountering Brakhage’s films. At the time of writing I hadn’t seen this 1965 essay by Davenport, for the National Review of all places, in which he judges Brakhage’s films the crowning achievement of the previous decade of American art. “Brakhage,” he winds up, “a tall Kansan who reminds one of a pony express scout
This was originally published in Canyon Cinemazine #6 .
Over a long period of months in the mid 1980s, Jane Wodening—then Jane Brakhage—listened and made notes as her husband recounted the painful particulars of his early years. A practiced storyteller in her own right, she then worked this raw material into a memoir narration with the magic quality of fable. The couple separated a few years later, and the text, after being partly serialized in Motion Picture , was left in the drawer until 2014. Already a dual act of retrospection, Brakhage’s Childhood (Granary