Stan VanDerBeek

Known for DirectingBorn 1927-01-06Died 1984-09-19New York, New York

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.Read more

Movies & web series

Poem Field No. 2

Astral Man

Pastorale

For Life, Against the War

Site

Reality's Invisible

Fuses

Science Friction

A La Mode

Achooo Mr. Kerrooschev

Breathdeath

Skullduggery

What, Who, How

See Saw Seams

Visual Velocity: The Work of Stan VanDerBeek

Home Movies 1971-81

Self-Poured Traits

Micro Cosmos 1-4

Sonia and Stan Paint a Portrait of Ronnie

Reeling in TV Time

After Laughter

Face Concert

Mirrored Reason

Euclidean Illusions

Strobe Ode

Vanishing Point Left

Color Fields Left

Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema”

Symmetricks

The Computer Generation

Who Ho Rays No. 1

Moirage

Videospace

Filmmakers

Superimposition

Ad Infinitum

Film Form No. 1

Oh

Poem Field No. 5: Free Fall

Image After Image

Expo Faces

Man and His World

Poem Field Series

Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version)

Panels for the Walls of the World

Poem Field No. 3

Spherical Space No. 1

Poem Field No. 1