James Broughton
Director · 1913 – 1999 · Modesto, California
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.
Movies14
Movie6.0DramaBroughton reads his poetry over various images.
Scattered Remains
1988 · 2 votes
Movie7.0DocumentaryJonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Birth of a Nation
1997 · 4 votes
Movie4.9DocumentaryCinématon 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.
Cinématon
1978 · 7 votes
Movie4.8DramaRomanceMen in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.
Devotions
1983 · 4 votes
Movie6.0DocumentaryThis 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."
Hermes Bird
1979 · 4 votes
Movie6.8DocumentaryExperimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
2011 · 12 votes
- Movie4.5
A single-frame portrait of Broughton's disembodied heads coming slowly together in wiggle, wobble and wonderment.
Together
1976 · 2 votes
Movie5.8DocumentaryDrama"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
Testament
1974 · 10 votes
Movie5.2DramaIn 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.
High Kukus
1973 · 18 votes
Movie7.0Drama'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.
Adventures of Jimmy
1951 · 7 votes
MovieDramaDocumentaryJungle 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.
Jungle Girl
1984
Movie5.3DocumentaryA chronicle of the iconoclastic life of gay poet, filmmaker, and spiritual visionary James Broughton, one of the defining voices of the sexual revolution, whose groundbreaking artistic celebrations of sexuality and the body influenced generations of the 1960s and '70s to profoundly embrace life and ‘follow your own weird’.
Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton
2013 · 7 votes
Movie7.5DocumentaryMapping extreme close-ups of Broughton's body, the camera slowly becomes a tool to reveal the erotic beauty of the body and the sensual pleasure in loving oneself. The ecstasy and power of sexual gratification are celebrated by the camera, as it probes, reveals, and visually caresses. Broughton's song is a praise of his body as divine androgyne, and an acceptance of this higher, sexual power.
Song of the Godbody
1977 · 2 votes
Movie4.9Celebrating 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.
The Water Circle
1975 · 9 votes