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.
Personal Details
Movies (50)
Visual Velocity: The Work of Stan VanDerBeek
2000
Home Movies 1971-81
1985
Reeling in TV Time
Director (Directing)
1983
Micro Cosmos 1-4
Director (Directing)
1983
Sonia and Stan Paint a Portrait of Ronnie
Director (Directing)
1983
Self-Poured Traits
Director (Directing)
1983
Face Concert
Director (Directing)
1981
After Laughter
Director (Directing)
1981
Mirrored Reason
Director (Directing)
1980
Euclidean Illusions
Director (Directing)
1980
Color Fields Left
Director (Directing)
1977
Vanishing Point Left
Director (Directing)
1977
Strobe Ode
Director (Directing)
1977
Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema”
1973
Symmetricks
Director (Directing)
1972
Reality's Invisible
as Himself
1972
Who Ho Rays No. 1
Director (Directing)
1972
The Computer Generation
Director (Directing)
1972
Videospace
Director (Directing)
1970
Moirage
Director (Directing)
1970
Filmmakers
as Himself
1969
Oh
Director (Directing)
1968
Ad Infinitum
Director (Directing)
1968
Poem Field No. 5: Free Fall
Director (Directing)
1968
Superimposition
Director (Directing)
1968
Film Form No. 1
Director (Directing)
1968
Fuses
Director of Photography (Camera)
1967
Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version)
Director (Directing)
1967
Poem Field No. 1
Director (Directing)
1967
Panels for the Walls of the World
Director (Directing)
1967
Poem Field Series
Director (Directing)
1967
Poem Field No. 7
Director (Directing)
1967
Image After Image
Director (Directing)
1967
For Life, Against the War
Director (Directing)
1967
Expo Faces
Director (Directing)
1967
Man and His World
Director (Directing)
1967
Poem Field No. 3
Director (Directing)
1967
Spherical Space No. 1
Director (Directing)
1967
Collide: Oscope
Director (Directing)
1966
Poem Field No. 2
Director (Directing)
1966
Vision III
Director (Directing)
1966
Movie-Drome
Director (Directing)
1966
See Saw Seams
Director (Directing)
1965
The Human Face Is a Monument
Director (Directing)
1965
Pastorale
Director (Directing)
1965
Movie-Movies
Director (Directing)
1965
Facescapes
Director (Directing)
1965
A Dam Rib Bed
Director (Directing)
1965
The Birth of the American Flag
Director (Directing)
1965
Fluids
Director (Directing)
1964