UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences present
Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village
10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90024

Without question one of cinema’s most influential and prolific artists, Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) created a monumentally significant and expressive body of work that spanned 50 years and over 350 films. For five decades, Brakhage worked in a highly distinctive, individualistic vein, mining celluloid cinema and--at least in his hands--its seemingly limitless potential for the articulation of raw subjective experience and pre-linguistic vision. The Academy Film Archive has been actively preserving and restoring Brakhage’s body of work since his collection was deposited there in 2004. In a career loaded with countless visionary works, Brakhage’s The Pittsburgh Documents (often called The Pittsburgh Trilogy) are a trio of acknowledged masterworks, and represent a radical approach to the concept of a cinematic document (as opposed to documentary) rooted in subjective observation. By training his eyes and the film medium on three subjects he felt were elusive, inscrutable, even fearful in their universality, Brakhage sought to gain some empathic foothold--if not an understanding--in these realms of authority (police), illness (hospital) and death (morgue).