By Brakhage, or What We Owe Jane Wodening

Labeled by Hollis Frampton as “the most profoundly differentiated and individuated woman in the history of film,” Jane Wodening was central to experimental film father Stan Brakhage’s work, and his films were dependent on her labor in a range of different spheres. As a pivotal figure in the American avant-garde, Jane’s involvement is acknowledged by film historians, but not in a way that allows for a meaningful conversation about how the full extent of Jane’s labor impacts the authorial signature of Stan Brakhage himself. This article is a provocation: an initial stocktaking of what Jane did, a consideration of support, gendered labor, and maintenance that draws from feminist theories of social reproduction to make Jane’s work visible. It also poses the question of how to consider the debts enabled by the intimacy of heterosexual marriage and family within the confines of the avant-garde as a limited public sphere.