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 …

Directed

1. Science Friction (1959) — Director
2. A La Mode (1959) — Director
3. Breathdeath (1963) — Director
4. Skullduggery (1962) — Director
5. What, Who, How (1957) — Director
6. Achooo Mr. Kerrooschev (1960) — Director
7. See Saw Seams (1965) — Director
8. Poem Field No. 2 (1966) — Director
9. Film Form No. 1 (1968) — Director
10. Pastorale (1965) — Director
11. For Life, Against the War (1967) — Director
12. Astral Man (1959) — Director
13. Site (1964) — Director
14. Image After Image (1967) — Director
15. Symmetricks (1972) — Director
16. Collide: Oscope (1966) — Director
17. Movie-Movies (1965) — Director
18. Vision III (1966) — Director
19. Superimposition (1968) — Director
20. Expo Faces (1967) — Director
21. Man and His World (1967) — Director
22. Poem Field No. 4 — Director
23. Poem Field No. 8 — Director
24. Poem Field No. 6 — Director
25. Black and White, Day and Night (1960) — Director
26. The Human Face Is a Monument (1965) — Director
27. Wheeeels No. 1 (1958) — Director
28. Poem Field Series (1967) — Director
29. Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version) (1967) — Director
30. Ad Infinitum (1968) — Director
31. Mankinda (1957) — Director
32. Panels for the Walls of the World (1967) — Director
33. Oh (1968) — Director
34. Movie-Drome (1966) — Director
35. Poem Field No. 3 (1967) — Director
36. Dance of the Looney Spoons (1959) — Director
37. The Smiling Workman (1960) — Director
38. Street Meat (1959) — Director
39. Wheeeeels No. 2 (1958) — Director
40. Fluids (1964) — Director

Also appeared in

1. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2011) — Himself (archive footage)
2. Reality's Invisible (1972) — Self
3. Home Movies 1971-81 (1985)
4. Filmmakers (1969) — Himself
5. Visual Velocity: The Work of Stan VanDerBeek (2000)
6. Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema” (1973)