Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson

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.

• 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

"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." -- M. Wayne Cunningham -- Canadian Book Review Annual