James Broughton (November 10, 1913 – May 17, 1999) was an American poet and poetic filmmaker. He was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a precursor to the . Broughton 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.
Broughton was kicked out of military school for having an affair with a classmate, and attended Stanford University before dropping out just before his class graduated in 1935. In 1945, he won the Alden Award given by the Stanford Dramatists' Alliance for his original screenplay Summer Fury. He spent time in Europe during the 1950s, culminating with an award at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival from Jean Cocteau for the "poetic fantasy" of his film The Pleasure Garden, made in England with partner Kermit Sheets.
Through his career, Broughton produced 25 books and 23 films. In 1967's "summer of love", Broughton made a film, The Bed, which broke taboos against frontal nudity and won prizes at many film festivals. The film rekindled Broughton's filmmaking and led to more films, including The Golden Positions, This Is It, The Water Circle, High Kukus, and Dreamwood. Broughton's films developed a following, especially among students at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught film (and wrote Seeing the Light, a book about filmmaking) and artistic ritual. In 1965, Broughton collaborated with harpist Joel Andrews to produce The Bard & the Harper, an album of recited poetry and music, on Gleeman Records.
With Singer, Broughton traveled and made more films – Hermes Bird (1979), a slow-motion look at an erection shot with the camera developed to photograph atomic bomb explosions, The Gardener of Eden (1981), filmed when they lived in Sri Lanka, Devotions (1983), a study of male relationships, and Scattered Remains (1988), a tribute to Broughton's poetry and filmmaking.
Broughton explored death deeply throughout his life. He died in May 1999 with champagne on his lips, in the house in Port Townsend, Washington, where he and Singer had lived for 10 years. His last words were: "My creeping decrepitude has crept me all the way to the crypt." His gravestone in a Port Townsend cemetery reads, "Adventure – not predicament."
Broughton had many creative love affairs during the San Francisco Beat Generation. He briefly lived with the film critic Pauline Kael and they had a daughter, Gina, who was born in 1948. Broughton put off marriage until the age of 49, when he married Suzanna Hart in a three-day ceremony on the Pacific coast, documented by his friend, the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Hart and Broughton had two children, and built a counter-culture community along with friends including Alan Watts, Michael McClure, Anna Halprin, and Imogen Cunningham.
The Films of James Broughton, a compilation of seventeen films on three DVDs, was released in 2006 by Facets Multimedia.
All: A James Broughton Reader, an anthology edited by Jack Foley, was released in 2007 by White Crane Books.
The 2012 documentary was directed by Stephen Silha, Eric Slade, and Dawn Logsdon, with cinematographer Ian Hinkle.
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