Stan VanDerBeek

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.

A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead. A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. A collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks death ... a parabolic parable.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

16mm film transferred to video, black and white, sound

Iimura creates a short self-portrait as well as brief portraits of five of his peers: Brakhage, Vanderbeek, Smith, Mekas and Warhol. In each portrait, Iimura attempts to copy the styles and traits of each artist (Vanderbeek's constantly moving camera; Mekas' experiments with film speed; Warhol's use of flashes of white against a black background), while briefly commenting on the images being shown. The film serves effectively as an introduction to the film styles of these artists.

A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead. A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. A collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks death ... a parabolic parable.

16mm film transferred to video, black and white, sound

Performance by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann.

Face Concert is an ode to human expression in which VanDerBeek transforms the face into a visual canvas.

16mm color work by Stan Vanderbeek that takes his work away from the cutups and the commentary and lands him in the psychedelic and abstract. Opticals, repetitions, camera moves and zooms are what make up the bulk of this exploration into fluids. The results bridge that realm between hangout art piece and intersteller stoner trip.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

Influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s spheres, VanDerBeek had the idea for a spherical theater where people would lie down and experience movies all around them. Floating multi-images would replace straight one-dimensional film projection. From 1957 on, VanDerBeek produced film sequences for the Movie-Drome, which he started building in 1963. His intention went far beyond the building itself and moved into the surrounding biosphere, the cosmos, the brain and even extraterrestrial intelligence.

A fantasy film of illusive geometry, changing and rebuilding itself by computer animation, unique visual magic done while artist-in-residence at NASA in Houston in conjunction with Richard Weinberg.

No synopsis available yet.

World leaders at the crossroads.

16mm film transferred to video, black and white, silent

"An animated vision... a subliminal glance at man in light and space" S.V.

Experimental film that used handheld projectors to present film images and slide projections.

"A film of video light and color. Dancers move through computer-generated patterns and fields of soft color to the music of Ravel. An experiment in video graphics combining the new technologies of video matting and analog computer patterns. One of the most successful of the Boston Symphoney Experiments, 1972, aired nationally." --S.V.

Vanderbeek photographs NYC, 1959. The 'meat' of the street: Doorways, debris, dilapidation. We meet a few youngsters and get a glimpse into a bygone era.

Dream matrix, history written in lightning image, memory and the TV syntax, images flowing and fused together to other images and electronic tapestry of images half seen, sought for, seeking man's dreams, movies as dreams, history as media. "The artist will tell you it is as much a process he is interested in ... as a result. Art is a process – life is a process – are they the same process? So many of the artists became unhappy about this eternal, unyielding quality in their art, and they began to wish their work were more like shoes, more temporary, more human, more able to admit of the possibility of change. The fixed, finished work began to be supplemented by the idea of work as a process, constantly becoming something else, tentative, allowing more than one interpretation." – Dick Higgins

In After Laughter, VanDerBeek constructs a rapid-fire montage depicting the evolution of the human race and the haunting specter of its destruction.

Strobe Ode is an exercise in video feedback and analog imaging, in which a circular image-field is modified and abstracted by strobe flashes.

This film uses stop motion animation of still photographs to convey images of politics and science in the nuclear era. The advancement of science allows man to do things he never would have been able to do without, for good or bad. Politicians are either behind the scenes manipulating those scientists or are using that science for their own goals, primarily in the space race. Everyday items and people are projected upwards - many in the form of rockets - followed by iconic structures, such as the Empire State Building, the US Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower and the Kremlin, being rocketed skyward as visual representations of that race into space.

A Kafka-inspired tale, Mirrored Reason tells the story of a woman who is haunted and eventually replaced by her double.

To create his “Poemfields” (1965-71) series, VanDerBeek worked closely with computer scientist Ken Knowlton and the staff at Bell Labs. Each “Poemfield” was adapted from poems by VanDerBeek, programmed on an IBM 7094 computer in black and white using a custom language known as BEFLIX, and colored after the fact by artists Robert Brown and Frank Olvey. Poemfield No. 2 features a soundtrack by jazz percussionist Paul Motian, known for his collaborations with Bill Evans.

An animated drawing done directly under the camera, combining painterly images and a drawn calligraphy, the works unfolds as you watch, permitting the viewer to see the process of the drawing.

A Stan VanDerBeek short film from 1965.

”Assassination, falling down, animated drawings from the landscape of memory, mankind falling down, faces with faces, a haunting view of man drawn in brilliant animation graphics.” – S.V., Filmmaker’s Cooperative Catalogue № 7.

"A study in ocular illusions, pattern superimposition producing other patterns and illusions of three dimensionality. A thorough demonstration of the richness and varied qualities of moiré patters by the acknowledged scientist/artist Gary Oster." S.V.

Similes of a slippery TV tube gesticulate break and supply – a long view of multiple images (Mr. Johnson's war, is it Howard Johnson's or President Johnson's war?) – a long curving view, breakfast with aspirin, good grief – or Goodbye. (SUPER-IMPOSITION is a videotape experiment with multiple images, made with film artist-in-residency at Colgate University.) Life and art ... interacting ... it is interesting to note that movies and psychoanalysis are approximately the same age ... there are now more TV sets in America than bathtubs. There are more radios in America than people. Although 75 percent of Japanese households have television sets, statistics show only 35 percent have running water and fewer than ten percent have flush sanitation. Some 40 percent of American children have one or more.

"The shapes of sound filmed from a computer system that reproduces analog patterns from sounds. This pioneer work in animated computer mandalas is a lyrical, abstract song with analog rhythms."

Against a black background and a pulsating beat matching white symmetrical geometric flashes around a central orb, white lines are drawn in mirror images vertical to each other. The images created are generally a myriad of faces in silhouette. Those silhouettes however often take on abstract forms in their entirety.

"Each film was constructed using Knowlton's BEFLIX computer language, which was based on FORTRAN. The films were programmed on a IBM 7094 computer. The films were created in black and white, with color added later by Brown and Olvey." --AT&T Archives and History Center

A subversive experimental short against the ruling class.

An experimental film

"A two screen Dream/Film/Farce/Sity about sleeps-two-sides-the Dream-Beast, animated trick photography combined into a knifed dream with a sexual dream's edge. A movie mural, based on the gender question... In question or sexus plexus... Dayglow dream life..." - Stan VanDerBeek

Camera animation over stills, “a portrait study of mankind, beginning with an infant and growing up to old age and death... using still pictures from the collection of ‘magnum photos on the range of expression and moods of people from all over the world, it reflects the human condition."

An animated and live action fantasy, the loop de loops of ten spoons, forks and tableware ... a parable in the shape of a soup spoon ... conceived as a children's film.

Stan VanDerBeek, experimental filmmaker at work with friend and computer expert Wade Shaw, at the sophisticated new (1972) computer at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and discussing the inevitable interaction of computers with artistic creativity. Clips from several VanDerBeek films.

In Sonia and Stan Paint a Portrait of Ronnie, VanDerBeek and artist Sonia Sheridan assemble a pastiche of images of Ronald Reagan, metamorphosed through digital computer graphics.

In Micro Cosmos, a series of four short computer-animated works, the image of an orb is transformed into a pulsating, energetic evocaton of life forces.

No synopsis available yet.

A cut-out of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sails over newspaper articles as they take place. Combines live photography and collage animation in one film.

Poem Field No. 6 is an computer-animated short made in the Beflix programming language.