James Broughton
Birth : 1913-11-10, Modesto, California
Death : 1999-05-07
History
James Broughton was an American poet and poetic filmmaker. He was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a precursor to the Beat poets. He was an early bard of the Radical Faeries as well as a member of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, serving the community as Sister Sermonetta. His work is quintessentially Californian – exploring and engaging the polar frontiers of wildness and civility, male and female, body and spirit—with the crash of Pacific Ocean waves echoing throughout. "Ultimately I have learned more about poetry / from music and magic than from literature," he wrote.
Self
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
Director
Broughton reads his poetry over various images.
Jungle Girl, experimental film master Richard Myers’ intensely personal tribute to Frances Gifford, star of the Republic Pictures serial of the 1940’s, a gentle, dream, memory work of haunting visual beauty.
Writer
Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.
Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.
Director
Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.
Writer
An old man (artist and landscape architect Bevis Bawa) contemplates the Garden of Eden.
Director
An old man (artist and landscape architect Bevis Bawa) contemplates the Garden of Eden.
Director
The love shaman calls for a sexual revolution of the body politic urging mankind into a new love age.
Director
This 11 minute homage to the male member shows its subject in the various stages of erection. The voice-over poem by James Broughton includes the line "This is the secret that will not stay hidden."
Narration
This 11 minute homage to the male member shows its subject in the various stages of erection. The voice-over poem by James Broughton includes the line "This is the secret that will not stay hidden."
N°409
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Director
Images, Joel Singer; Sounds, James Broughton.
"The film is shot both through and at a window, superimposing and conjoining, thereby elaborating events on both sides of the glass. Broughton's accompanying poem sings the same song as the images, sounding from an Eden of the golden passing of days: "They were seeing the light every day then ... / They were looking and they were seeing / They were living there in the light at that time." - Robert Lipman, On the Films of Joel Singer
Director
Close-up shots of Broughton's body.
Close-up shots of Broughton's body.
Director
The film travels in close-up over the mysterious terrains of nude human bodies as they touch and explore one another.
Director
A single-frame portrait of Broughton's disembodied heads coming slowly together in wiggle, wobble and wonderment.
A single-frame portrait of Broughton's disembodied heads coming slowly together in wiggle, wobble and wonderment.
Celebrating the circulation of the waters of the world, this homage to James Broughton's favorite sage Lao-tsu is illustrated by the dance of sunlight on the sea. Accompanying poem (read and written by James Broughton) was composed to the music of Corelli, from his Concerto Grosso No. 9 in A, performed on the harp by Joel Andrews.
Director
Celebrating the circulation of the waters of the world, this homage to James Broughton's favorite sage Lao-tsu is illustrated by the dance of sunlight on the sea. Accompanying poem (read and written by James Broughton) was composed to the music of Corelli, from his Concerto Grosso No. 9 in A, performed on the harp by Joel Andrews.
Director
"TESTAMENT is James Broughton's exquisite self-portrait. A major figure in avant-garde filmmaking and poetry since the 1940s, Broughton views his life and life's work with irony, charm, humor, and a combination of joyous self-love and gentle self-depreciation. Scenes from his earlier films mix the elements of humor, magic, slapstick, melodrama, and romance which mark his aesthetic. A plethora of rich personal symbols is woven throughout the film, tied together by verbal games, Zen poems, anecdotes, songs, a child's prayer, dreams, and visions." - Karen Cooper "James Broughton's TESTAMENT is one of the most remarkable films ever produced within the American independent cinema. It is the most moving and most sublimely detached of the recent trend of filmic autobiographies - by Jerome Hill, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Brakhage, to name only the masters, and Broughton's peers." - P. Adams Sitney "A beautiful, important, mysterious work." - Amos Vogel
In this homage to Zen poet Basho, the subtle changes of a pond are chronicled on film over a period of time. Broughton recites his cuckoo haikus in the background.
Director
In this homage to Zen poet Basho, the subtle changes of a pond are chronicled on film over a period of time. Broughton recites his cuckoo haikus in the background.
Writer
Dreamwood narrates the oniric quest of a modern argonaut in a mysterious island located somewhere on the borders of the unconscious.
Director
Dreamwood narrates the oniric quest of a modern argonaut in a mysterious island located somewhere on the borders of the unconscious.
Director
James Broughton's creation myth, THIS IS IT, places a 2-year-old Adam and a bright apple-red balloon in a backyard garden of Eden, and works a small miracle of the ordinary. And since that miracle is what his film is about, he achieves a kind of casual perfection in matching means and ends.
Director
A lovely, poetic, humorous and crystal investigation of mankind standing, sitting and lying down. - John Wasserman
Director
This film celebrates weddings and being wed, and the union of opposites in everything everywhere.
Director
James Broughton's counterculture masterpiece about nudity and a bed.
"The poet Daisy Aldan (who brought Gerard Malanga into the world of experimental filmmaking) directed a beautifully evocative and impressionistic documentary, Once Upon an El, in 8mm color with a 7 1/2 ips tape soundtrack. The 15-minute film's cast included John Ashberry, James Broughton, Chester Kallman, Frank O'Hara, Olga Petroff, Kermit Sheets, and other luminaries of the Avant-Garde, the soundtrack was composed by Storm de Hirsch. Once Upon An El documented the activities of a group of writers and composers...[demonstrating] against the demolition of New York's Third Avenue elevated railway (FMC 1967, 7-8) , which was demolished anyway" - Wheeler Winston Dixon
Writer
People quietly or campily pass the time in an overgrown garden full of statues, while a puritanical, funereal gentleman posts bills prohibiting all leisure activities.
Director
People quietly or campily pass the time in an overgrown garden full of statues, while a puritanical, funereal gentleman posts bills prohibiting all leisure activities.
Director
A short black and white film from James Broughton with Kermit Sheets in a Chaplinesque role.
Director
Poems narrate four afternoon vignettes; each protagonist is older than the one in the previous sketch.
'Adventures of Jimmy' resolves its immature hero’s quest for “playmates” through a tongue-in-cheek narration that juxtaposes ironically with the images. We are told his family left him their whole estate, as we see a shack in the woods. The happy resolution is a joke on monogamy. It’s a straightforward story, the work of someone who wants to entertain with elegance and quiet subversion.
Director
'Adventures of Jimmy' resolves its immature hero’s quest for “playmates” through a tongue-in-cheek narration that juxtaposes ironically with the images. We are told his family left him their whole estate, as we see a shack in the woods. The happy resolution is a joke on monogamy. It’s a straightforward story, the work of someone who wants to entertain with elegance and quiet subversion.
Writer
Accepting the potentialities of the medium to manipulate both time and space, Broughton brings past and present head-on as he regards with adult feelings his childhood family and friends. Grown-ups romp like children, and by their magnified infantilism playfully underscore such basic traits as sadism, sensuality, arid egocentricity. (Melbourne International Film Festival)
Director
Accepting the potentialities of the medium to manipulate both time and space, Broughton brings past and present head-on as he regards with adult feelings his childhood family and friends. Grown-ups romp like children, and by their magnified infantilism playfully underscore such basic traits as sadism, sensuality, arid egocentricity. (Melbourne International Film Festival)
Director
A soundless mix of story fragments and images. Initially, images of death, a man with a guitar, a soirée. Some images are surreal: an older woman eats a leaf; a headless man pours a cocktail into his body.
