Known For
Directing
Born
Jan 06, 1927
Died
Sep 19, 1984
Place of Birth
New York, New York
Credits
75 titles
Stan VanDerBeek
Biography
American experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek began his career in the 1950’s after having studied art and architecture in New York and North Carolina. His earliest period (1955-1965) is marked by his animated painting and collage films which the artist and critic Daryl Chin regarded as having an “enormous vitality, bounding inventiveness and incendiary wit which was shared by such other collagists as Robert Breer, Bruce Conner, Dick Preston.” Films such as Science Friction (1959, 10’), Breathdeath (1963, 15’), A la Mode (1959, 7’) and Achoo Mr. Kerrooschev (1960, 2’) are from this period. In the 1960’s, in the context of his expanded cinema research, Vanderbeek started his audacious project of the “Movie Drome” theater, a space that allowed him to create an appropriate environment for his synesthetic works, which included film, performance and dance among other disciplines. The filmmaker spent about 10 years developing this project, which consisted of a huge dome that surrounded the audience and engulfed them in the images projected all around them. From the mid-1960’s, Vanderbeek ‘s appetite for exploring new technologies increased and tools such as video played a major part in the filmmaker’s work. This can be seen in his computer-animated films from this period such as Symmetricks (1972, 6’) and the Poemfield series of 8 computer generated animations (1966-1971). His work with computers and experiments with holograms reflected his desire to use the most complex technology to get as close as possible to the functioning of the human nervous system. In addition to his creative work in the fields of film and video art, Vanderbeek was a faculty member and artist-in-residence at a number of major universities. He died in 1984.
Known For
Filmography
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
Himself (archive footage)
Visual Velocity: The Work of Stan VanDerBeek
Birth of a Nation
Self
Home Movies 1971-81
Reeling in TV Time
Director
Micro Cosmos 1-4
Director
Sonia and Stan Paint a Portrait of Ronnie
Director
Self-Poured Traits
Director
Face Concert
Director
After Laughter
Director
Mirrored Reason
Director
Euclidean Illusions
Director
Color Fields Left
Director
Vanishing Point Left
Director
Strobe Ode
Director
Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema”
Symmetricks
Director
Reality's Invisible
Self
Who Ho Rays No. 1
Director
The Computer Generation
Director
Videospace
Director
Moirage
Director
Filmmakers
Himself
Oh
Director
Ad Infinitum
Director
Poem Field No. 5: Free Fall
Director
Superimposition
Director
Film Form No. 1
Director
Fuses
Director of Photography
Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version)
Director
Poem Field No. 1
Director
Panels for the Walls of the World
Director
Poem Field Series
Director
Poem Field No. 7
Director
Image After Image
Director
For Life, Against the War
Director
Expo Faces
Director
Man and His World
Director
Spherical Space No. 1
Director
Poem Field No. 3
Director
Collide: Oscope
Director
Movie-Drome
Director
Vision III
Director
Poem Field No. 2
Director
Pastorale
Director
The Human Face Is a Monument
Director
See Saw Seams
Director
Movie-Movies
Director
Facescapes
Director
A Dam Rib Bed
Director