Film at Wit\'s End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers
Adapted from classroom lectures, Brakhage's profiles of eight avant-garde filmmakers have a conversational, relaxed flow. If the tone is chummy and the frequent superlatives annoying, the narratives are nevertheless coherent. Among those we meet are Maya Deren, Voodoun priestess of Greenwich Village and well-known personality of the 1940s and '50s; Christopher MacLaine, chronicler of San Francisco's Beat movement; and Ken Jacobs, whose films include Soft Rain , Blonde Cobra , and Little Stabs at Happiness .