create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be?”
His goal as a filmmaker was bold and presumptuous: “Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.’”
A Brakhage film often lacked narrative, a deliberate choice, which made his work inscrutable to many. A decade after his first film, Interim, produced as a nineteen-year-old in 1952, the New York Times at last reviewed one of his works, Anticipation of the Night, four years after it had been completed. The melancholy meditation on suicide, for which he even contemplated committing his own, did not impress the critic Eugene Archer, who wrote: “It might better be called ‘Gleanings from the Cutting Room Floor.’”
Even those mainstream critics who admired his work were sometimes stretched for explanation. “There is beauty and serenity in Brakhage’s world of constantly changing colors and shapes,” Vincent Canby wrote in the Times in a 1975 review of The Text of Light. “Sometimes they fill the screen like volcanic eruptions; at other times they merely punctuate the black background, suggesting lazy, radioactive caterpillars looking for a rest.”
Brakhage created meditations on subjects as mundane as domestic life and as sacred as sexuality. Many of his pieces were autobiographical. In 1959, Brakhage graphically documented the birth of one of his children in Window Water Baby Moving, filmed before camcorders became standard delivery-room accessories. At the time, television portrayed married couples sleeping in separate beds.
His best-known work is Dog Star Man, a series of shorts combined into a seventy-four-minute film released in 1964. The mythic themes of the watershed film have been compared with the poetry of William Blake. Dog Star Man is regarded as one of the greatest pieces of American cinema, although its audience has been substantially smaller than that for, say, Titanic.
“He was a painter or poet in cinema,” said P. Adams Sitney, a film historian at Princeton University, “not a novelist like everybody else.”
Sitney confidently predicts the filmmaker someday will be regarded as the pre-eminent artist of the twentieth century.
Brakhage was born in an orphanage in Kansas City, Missouri, where he spent the first weeks of his life named Robert Sanders before being adopted by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage. They named the boy James Stanley.
He attended high school in Denver and performed on the radio as a boy soprano. After suffering a nervous breakdown as a freshman at Dartmouth College, he dropped out and took up filmmaking. He met and was influenced by such figures of the avant-garde as Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. The personal films of Marie Menken had a great influence on him, as did Jean Cocteau, the Italian neo-realists, and the writings of Gertrude Stein.
In 1957, he married Jane Collom, with whom he collaborated, and he would take as his subject their life together, as well as that of their five children.
Brakhage was a noted educator in filmmaking, lecturing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1969 to 1981 and teaching at universities in Colorado for more than forty years. He was also a prolific writer, although many of his essays were too dense for all but the most dedicated film student.
After divorcing in 1987, Brakhage moved from Lump Gulch to Boulder, Colorado. He later began a relationship with Marilyn Jull, whom he married in Toronto in 1989. They lived there for eight months, returning to Colorado only after he was unable to secure a suitable position at one of the universities in Ontario.
Among his many awards were Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships and, in 1986, the inaugural Maya Deren Award for independent film and video artists from the American Film Institute. When Brakhage became the first filmmaker to receive the prestigious Edward MacDowell medal in 1989, Scorsese presented the award in a ceremony at Peterborough, New Hampshire.
In 2002, Brakhage moved to Victoria, his wife’s hometown, where he lived six months before dying of cancer. Though bedridden, Brakhage continued filming through the final days of his illness. He completed Stan’s Window, which was filmed chiefly through the windows and doors of his sick room. He also scratched emulsion with his fingernail in his final work, titled The Chinese Series. Inspired by Chinese language and thought, it was incomplete at his death.
March 13, 2003
Trailblazers
Margaret Fane Rutledge
Aviatrix
(April 13, 1914—December 2, 2004)
Margaret Fane Rutledge founded the famed Flying Seven, a legendary group of pioneer aviatrixes from Vancouver who showed a woman’s place was in the cockpit.
Inspired by the wonders of flight after seeing an airplane aloft early in childhood, she became the first woman west of Toronto to earn a commercial pilot’s licence. She was unable to earn a livelihood in the air, however, as even the smallest airlines refused to hire a woman pilot. She instead learned to operate a ham radio and is regarded as the first woman to do so for an airline in Canada, if not the world. Once in an airline’s employ, she managed to pilot several commercial flights without mishap.
Margaret Rutledge was a stocky, square-jawed woman whose considerable aviation skills elevated her above every roadblock placed in her path.
Born in Edmonton at a time when newspapers cheered the “dizzy doings” of daredevils performing loops in rickety biplanes, she enjoyed a birthright as the daughter of parents thrilled by the dawning of the age of flight. Both her mother and father had flown as passengers in the first airplane to arrive in the Alberta capital. Her father, who owned an automobile repair shop, later built a glider with his own hands.
Rutledge first flew aboard an aircraft in 1928. Three years later, a tour billed as the Trans-Canada Air Pageant landed in Edmonton. The thrilling display convinced the seventeen-year-old youth that her future was in the clouds. She scrimped for two years before enrolling at the Edmonton and Northern Alberta Aero Club, which had been launched with First World War ace Wop May as president and chief instructor. Rutledge became a prize pupil of Moss Burbridge, of whom it is said not one of his seven hundred students ever suffered an injury.
She trained on such biplanes as a Cirrus Moth, Gypsy Moth, American Eagle and Alexander Eaglerock, the latter a favourite of prairie barnstormers. On October 12, 1933, she was issued private pilot’s licence No. 1317.
By doing the club’s books and handling chores such as stretching fabric over the wooden ribs of an aircraft, Rutledge earned free flying time, according to aviation historian Shirley Render. The deal was a necessity for the ambitious pilot, whose earnings of $22 per week were not enough to cover lessons that cost $12 an hour. On August 29, 1935, she was issued commercial licence A1236, becoming the first woman in Western Canada to be so qualified.
As the twenty-one-year-old woman prepared to join her family in moving to Vancouver later that year, the male members of the club presented her with an engraved watch acknowledging her achievement. Pleased to discover six other licensed women pilots in Vancouver, Rutledge travelled to Burbank, California, to meet Lauretta Schimmoler, a pilot from Ohio and one of the founders of the Ninety-Nines. The group, which took its name from the ninety-nine licensed women pilots who attended its inaugural meeting, decided Canada had too few pilots to permit a chapter. The journey was not an entire bust for Rutledge, however, as she did get to meet the famed Amelia Earhart.
Rejected in the United States, Rutledge returned to Vancouver determined to organize her own informal club. The Flying Seven, formed on October 15, 1936, captured the imagination of Vancouver by staging a dawn-to-dusk flight the following month. A Golden Eagle and a
