Jane Wodening, 87, was an experimental film star and intrepid writer
Jane Wodening, longtime collaborator and wife of Stan Brakhage, the avant-garde filmmaker, and an author who flourished after their divorce, writing stories about her years living on the road and then alone in a mountain shack, died Nov. 17 at her home in Denver. She was 87.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said her daughter, Crystal Brakhage.
Stan Brakhage, who died in 2003, was among the most influential experimental filmmakers of the 20th century, though his work could be considered an acquired taste. He made hundreds of movies, most of them silent. They were deeply personal, sometimes elegiac, and very beautiful, though they dispensed with any recognizable narrative, often veering into complete abstraction.
For three decades, starting in the 1960s, he and Ms. Wodening lived a spartan life in a centuryold cabin in a ghost town in the Rocky Mountains called Lump Gulch, sharing it with their five children and many animals, including a pigeon named Fanny.
Brakhage captured this world in his idiosyncratic, inscrutable way, in what film critic J. Hoberman, writing in The Village Voice, described as “home movies raised to the zillionth power — silent and rhythmic, based on an invented language of percussive shifts in exposure or focus, multiple superimpositions, refracted light, and staccato camera moves.”
Ms. Wodening was the star of many of them. He filmed her delivering their first child in a bathtub in “Window Water Baby Moving” (1959), a startlingly lovely work that is considered one of his masterpieces. “Wedlock House: An Intercourse” (1959) is a kind of short horror film, with flickering images of the couple having sex interspersed with flickering shots of them having an argument.
The work didn’t sit well with feminists, who accused Brakhage of objectifying his wife. But Ms. Wodening didn’t see herself that way.
Brakhage, never totally faithful, left Ms. Wodening for another woman, and in 1987 the couple divorced. The children had left home, the cabin was sold, as were the animals, and Ms. Wodening took off in a bright yellow Honda Civic transformed so that she could live in it.
For three years she spent months at a time on the road, touring the country, camping in arroyos, mountain trails, and friends’ driveways, even working for a spell as a tour guide at an archeological site near Barstow, Calif., in the Mojave Desert.
“Driveabout,” a 2016 account of that time from Sockwood Press, one of the small presses that has published her work over the years, is charming, funny, and often quite profound, like Henry David Thoreau but spiced with mild profanity and more drama, as Ms. Wodening faced perils as a single woman sleeping in truck stops, camping near sketchy characters, and nursing an old friend through delirium tremens.
In this and other works, she came into her own. Her voice was as engaging and charming as her former husband’s was abstruse. Steve Clay, a founder of Granary Books in New York City, a small publishing house that is devoted to poetry and art books and that has put out works by Ms. Wodening, recalled his expectation that the wife of Brakhage would be more “formally experimental” in her writing. “Instead, it was sort of folksy and straightforward,” he wrote in an email.
To film buffs, however, Ms. Wodening remained a mythic figure — an “Enigmatic Character in Film History” as one radio program described her in a headline.
She was born Mary Jane Collom on Sept. 7, 1936, in Chicago, and grew up in Fraser, Colo.Her parents, Harry and Margaret (Jack) Collom, were teachers at the local school, where Harry was also the principal.
When she met Brakhage, “we were adolescent wrecks,” she told an audience a few years ago at Los Angeles Filmforum, a showcase for experimental movies. They married in 1957.
For most of her adult life, she was Jane Brakhage. When she returned from her car travels, transformed, she changed her name. She settled on Wodening, meaning child of Woden, the Anglo-Saxon god; since her family lineage stretched back to the early Britons, it felt somehow appropriate, she said. And she bought property near Eldora, Colo., about 20 miles west of Boulder, a mountainous site where she lived in a Hobbit-like shack with no electricity or running water — but thousands of books and a typewriter.
In addition to her daughter, Crystal, Ms. Wodening leaves her daughters Myrrena Schwegmann and Neowyn Bartek; her sons, Bearthm and Rarc Brakhage; 14 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.