Jane Wodening
Also Known As: Jane Wodening, Mary Jane Collom
Biography: Jane Wodening (born Mary Jane Collom, and formerly known as Jane Brakhage) is an American writer and the first wife of filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The birth of their first child is the subject of the 1959 experimental short film Window Water Baby Moving. Wodening married Stan Brakhage in 1957 and is credited with creating scrapbooks for the Brakhage family during what is recognized as the filmmaker's most significant period of creation from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s. The couple separated in 1987. Description above from the Wikipedia article Jane Wodening, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois
Birthday: Not available
Deathday: November 17, 2023
Adult: No
Gender: Female
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Known For:
Sonic Youth: Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui (April 12, 2003)
Overview: Filmed April 12, 2003 at a benefit concert held at and for The Anthology Film Archives, the international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of avant-garde and independent cinema. In addition to screening films for the public, AFA houses a film museum, research library and art gallery. The event, which raised money for the Archives and celebrated the life and work of avant-garde film maker Stan Brakhage, featured Sonic Youth providing an improvised instrumental collaboration with silent Brakhage’s films. The band performed with drummer/percussionist Tim Barnes (Essex Green, Jukeboxer, Silver Jews).
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2003-04-12
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Stan & Jane Brakhage
Overview: A poignant portrait of Stan and Jane Brakhage visiting Juarez.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1981-03-31
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Cat's Cradle
Overview: Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work with their hands, occasionally looking up. A man enters a room, a woman smiles. He sits, another man sits and smokes. The cat stretches. There are close-ups of each. The light is dim; a filter accentuates red. A bare foot stands on a satin sheet. A woman disrobes. She pets the cat. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.
Genres: Animation
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1959-01-01
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Window Water Baby Moving
Overview: On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With the help of the attending hands, the mother expels the placenta. The infant, a baby girl, nurses. We return from time to time to the bath scene. By the end, dad's excited; mother and daughter rest. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1959-08-02
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Hymn to Her
Overview: "HER" to me is always Jane, in the first place, but also Hera: "goddess of women and marriage," naturally enough. Then, too, as it is a hymn of light, and as he/me feels the self that way, it sings of and to itself.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1974-09-07
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As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Overview: A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2000-11-05
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Thigh Line Lyre Triangular
Overview: Only at a crisis do I see both the scene as I've been trained to see it ( that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic–colors as we've been trained to call a color a color, as so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through the optic nerves... spots before my eyes, so to speak... and it's very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I've seen that every time a child was born... Now none of that was in WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING; and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed all of my seeing at such a time.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1961-11-07
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The Stars Are Beautiful
Overview: We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the family, while the narrator explains the heavens. We see a bee up close. The narrator suggests metaphors for heavenly bodies. Scenes fade into a black screen or dim purple; close-ups of family life may be blurry. The words about the heavens, such as "The stars are a flock of hummingbirds," contrast with images and sounds of real children.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1974-11-19
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Jane
Overview: Someone said to me, of this film, that it was really about light; but Jane (who takes it as a portrait – i. e., sees herself in it) said: You gave me the moon and seven stars... and I signed this film, simply, Stan.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1985-01-01
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Song 1
Overview: SONG 1: Portrait of a lady (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1964-03-20
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Song 5
Overview: SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1964-03-20
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Thot-Fal'N
Overview: This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1978-06-27
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Wedlock House: An Intercourse
Overview: We see a film negative of a nude couple embracing in bed. Then, back in regular black and white images, we see them alone and together, clothed, at home. It's night, she sees his reflection in the window, she closes the drapes. After sex, again in a black and white negative, they sit, smoke, have coffee. They kiss, she smiles. They light candles. The images are often quick, the camera angles occasionally are off kilter; the room is sometimes dark and sometimes lit, as if lit by the rotating of a searchlight. The images again appear in negative when they return to bed.
Genres: Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1959-04-27
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Brakhage
Overview: BRAKHAGE explores the depth and breadth of the filmmaker’s genius, the exquisite splendor of his films, his magic personal charm, his aesthetic fellow travelers, and the influence his work has had on generations of other creators. While touching on significant moments in Brakhage’s biography, the film celebrates Brakhage’s visionary genius, and explores the extraordinary artistic possibilities of cinema, a medium mostly known only for its commercial applications in the form of narratives, cartoons, documentaries, and advertising. BRAKHAGE combines excerpts from Brakhage’s films and films of other avant-garde filmmakers (eg, George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Willie Varela, Bruce Elder, and others); interviews with Brakhage, his friends, family, colleagues, and critics; archival footage of Brakhage spanning the past thirty-five years; and location shooting in Boulder, Colorado and New York.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1998-09-17
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Birth of a Nation
Overview: Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1997-08-06
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Dog Star Man: Part I
Overview: From a murky landscape, a wooded mountain emerges. We watch the sun. We see a bearded man climbing up the mountain through the snow. He carries an ax, and he's accompanied by a dog. His labors continue. There is no soundtrack. Images rush past - water, trees, and surfaces too close up to distinguish. He struggles. A fire burns. Nature, in long shots and magnified, is formidable and silent. It's tough going; he carries on. In a capillary, blood flows.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1963-03-18
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Dog Star Man: Part III
Overview: Sexual intimacy. Three kinds of images race past, superimposed on each other sometimes: two bodies, a man and a woman's, close up, nude - patches of skin, wisps of hair, glimpses of a face and genitalia; strips of celluloid with lines and squiggles scratched on them; and, close-up shots of what appear to be the insides of living bodies - a heart beating, muscle and sinew and tissue wet with fluids. The exterior and interior of desire.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1964-11-17
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Prelude: Dog Star Man
Overview: A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time. Part of the Dog Star Man series of experimental films.
Genres: Drama Fantasy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1962-04-15
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Dog Star Man: Part IV
Overview: A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images include a mountain peak, farm buildings, a tree stump, a fire, a crawling baby, and the sun. The man falls and rolls. Then, later, he swings his ax.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1964-11-17
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The Art of Vision
Overview: A deconstruction of Dog Star Man that takes the four rolls and shows them first combined, then each combination of three rolls, then each combination of two rolls, then each individual roll. The plot is of a man who goes up a mountain with a dog to chop down a tree but has some unspecified transcendental experience while he is there.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1965-05-20
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Sexual Meditation: Faun's Room, Yale
Overview: This, the third of the Sexual Meditation Series, might also be seen as a triangular portrait of Julia and P. Adams Sitney and Jane Brakhage.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1972-08-09
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Tortured Dust
Overview: The culmination of a series of autobiographical films that Brakhage made about his family (collectively known as The Book of Family), Tortured Dust was shot as the filmmaker's children from his first marriage were beginning to leave the house, and edited during Brakhage and his first wife Jane's impending separation. The first half concentrates on Brakhage's teenage sons as they move around the cabin that has been their home for almost 20 years, and the second half turns towards the filmmaker's three daughters.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1984-04-13
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Jane Brakhage
Overview: "I picked up Stan and Jane Brakhage at the airport and drove them to San Francisco State College where Stan spoke about his films to the student body. I was fascinated with Jane. She was so interested in the world around her while Stan seemed caught up only in his ideas. She picked seed pods from trees and plants and told me she had written a lexicon of dog language. She was so much more complex than Stan's portrayal of her in Window Water Baby Moving (1958) that I decided to make a documentary about her for my graduate project." — Barbara Hammer 16mm film, Color/Sound
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1975-01-01
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Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
Overview: An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-11-23
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Dog Star Man
Overview: Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.
Genres: Fantasy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1965-02-22
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