Stan VanDerBeek

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.

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

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.

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.

Visual Velocity is a tribute to the pioneering work of Stan VanDerBeek. VanDerBeek was an experimental filmmaker, artist, animator, and media visionary. Produced by David Donnelly, the work originally aired on PBS stations' THE TERRITORY, the longest running public television showcase of independent film/video in the country.

Fulton made the film during his brief time at Harvard, where he had been invited to teach by Robert Gardner, his friend and collaborator (Fulton would later serve as a cinematographer on Gardner’s 1981 documentary Deep Hearts, among others). Reality’s Invisible could be described as a portrait of the Carpenter Center, yet it is a portrait of an extremely idiosyncratic and distinctive sort. Fulton moves us through the concrete space of the Center’s Le Corbusier-designed building—the only structure by the architect in North America—but, more centrally, presents us footage of students making and discussing their work alongside figures like Gardner, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, artist Stan Vanderbeek, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and graphic designer Toshi Katayama.

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.

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.

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

"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."

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.

"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

Performance by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

No synopsis available yet.

World leaders at the crossroads.

An experimental film

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

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

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.

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.