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.Table of Contents: Table of Contents for The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson by R. Bruce Elder With Gratitude Acknowledgments Preface From the Givenness of Nature to the Encumbered Modern Body The Signifying Body The Two Bodies in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Body Observed Externally and the Body Experienced from Within The Modern Bodyâs Unbearable Burden of Being The Harmony of Spirit and Body The Primacy of the Subject Body and the Recessiveness of the Subject Body Chapter 1. Four for America: Williams, Pound, Stein, Brakhage Styles of English Metre Meaning and Personal Being: Pound and Brakhage The Seachange: Or, How Pound Came âTo Break the Pentameterâ Bergson, Hulme, Pound, and Brakhage on the Body and Energy Experience as Energy: A Pattern for Thinking First-Person Singular: Bergson, Hulme, and Brakhage on the Primacy of Individuality Between Self and World: The Image in Hulme, Williams, Brakhage Writing = Composing Soundâs Energies, Filmmaking = Composing Lightâs Energies: Gertrude Stein and Stan Brakhageâs Conceptions of Their Media Digressive Interpolation: The Persistence of Emersonâs Vision in Steinâs Writing and Brakhageâs Filmmaking Out of Stein: A Theory of Meaning for Stan Brakhageâs Films The Paradox of a Perlocutionary Semantics: Brakhage and Stein on Artistic Meaning The Romanticism of Brakhageâs Conception of Meaning Chapter 2. The Conception of the Body in Open Form Poetics and Its Influence on Stan Brakhageâs Filmmaking H. Lawrence and the Poetics of Energy Two Crucial Influences on Embodied Poetics: A.N. Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty A.N. Whiteheadâs Project: Reconciling Permanence and Flux Olsonâs Energetics of Embodied Existence Michael McClureâs Poetics: The Body Is an Organism. The Universe Is an Organism. A Poem Embodies an Aspect of the Universeâs Evolving Form Allen Ginsberg: The Breath, the Voice, and the Poem Action Painting as Performance Glossary Notes Selected Bibliography Stan Brakhage Filmography Index