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Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage is one of the most influential filmmakers in American avant-garde cinema, noted for his unflinching social commentaries and technical innovations. Over his nearly 40-year career, he has made over 200 films of varying length. He made his first film, Interim (1952) at age 18 after dropping out of college. Brakhage films seek to change the way we see. They encourage viewers to eschew traditional narrative structure in favor of pure visual perception that is not reliant on naming what is seen; rather his goal is to create a more visceral visual experience, for he believes that a "stream-of visual-consciousness could be nothing less than the pathway of the soul." To this end, his films are shot in highly sensual colors and utilize minimal soundtracks.

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Movies Made By Stan Brakhage (369)

20 Little Films (2012)

Each year since 1995, the Viennale has asked a great, international director to make his or her own personal contribution to the festival: a contribution in the form of a small, approximately one-minute film, which is used as a kind of introduction to the ...

Drawings by Billy and His Friends (2011)

In this experimental short film, Kristian Day collected artwork created by the public. He found the majority of the pieces at "Sharpie marker demonstration tables" and it took almost a year to collect the artwork. All pieces were created by chance with no ...

By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume Two (2010)

In Criterion's first volume of the anthology By Brakhage, we brought twenty-six astonishing works by the avant-garde film pioneer Stan Brakhage to home video for the first time. Now, in this second installment, we are proud to present thirty more of Brakha ...

Sweetgrass (2009)

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature ...

By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One (2003)

Working completely outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of "birth, sex, death, and the search for God," he has turned his camera on expl ...

Chinese Series (2003)

Stan Brakhage's final film, made shortly before his death by wetting a filmstrip with saliva and using his fingernail to scratch marks into the emulsion. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009. ...

Stan's Window & Work in Progress (2003)

Stan's Window & Work in Progress (2003)

Stan's Window: This companion to Marilyn's Window was Brakhage housebound when he made this film. Work in Progress contains some of the last rolls he ever photographed. ...

Panels for the Walls of Heaven (2002)

The last of Brakhage's longer works. Part of the "Vancouver Island" films. "Purple flashes are followed by a curtain of purple and blues, first seemingly static and then in motion. Close-ups of textures of paint evolve into flashes of jewel-like red, then ...

Resurrectus Est (2002)

Resurrectus Est is a hand painted film which suggests, from the first, a spread of fragments of plants and flowers, individual petals and bits of twig with multiple colors, with much green "leafiness". This gives way to solid yellows and browns of, or sugg ...

SB (One Minute for Vienna) (2002)

Every year, the VIENNALE invites an outstanding film artist to create the festivals trailer. For this year, Stan Brakhage provided the festival with an exceptionally colorful, dynamic handpainted film which he calls SB. It contains all the elements that ha ...

Seasons... (2002)

Brakhage's frame-by-frame hand carvings and etchings directly into the film emulsion, sometimes photographically combined with paint, are illuminated by Solomon's optical printing; this footage was then edited by Solomon into a four part 'seasonal cycle'. ...

Song of the Mushroom (2002)

Song of the Mushroom (2002), completed in December 2002, is a collaboration between filmmakers Joel Haertling and Stan Brakhage. With interest in mycology, Haertling made mushroom spore prints directly onto clear 16mm film. A 7.25-second loop was passed fr ...

Persian Series #13 (2001)

Persian Series #13 (2001)

Persian Series #13 is a series of extremely dark images, mostly in purples, greens, and fiery red-orange-yellows, shifting one to another in displays of textured shapes which suggest a thick tangle weave of threads. ...

Persian Series #14 (2001)

Persian Series #14 (2001)

Persian Series #14 is composed of muted color-shapes shifting variably in juxtaposition and contrast with high-contrast black & white abstract patterns. ...

Persian Series #15 (2001)

Persian Series #15 (2001)

Persian Series #15 is a rapid shift of patterns black & white playing off against muted coils of color. ...

Persian Series #16 (2001)

Persian Series #16 is an even more exaggerated contrast of color and black-and-white patterning. ...

Persian Series #17 (2001)

Persian Series #17 (2001)

Persian Series #17 is a series of quite distinct globules of paint brilliantly colored and shifting as if vertically in the plane (as different from the more horizontally oriented previous parts). ...

Persian Series #18 (2001)

Persian Series #18 (2001)

Persian Series #18 is almost calligraphic in its overlays of dark (occasionally colored) glyphs backed by brilliant color motifs. ...

Persian Series (2001)

An 18-part series of colorful shorts, made by Stan Brakhage between 1999 and 2001. ...

Micro Garden (2001)

Red and ephemeral blue and purple plant shapes half-curled against a tan ground, which begins to flash white cracks in dried mud patterns. A flush of watery blues (in this hand-painted step-printed film) brightens the plant-skein into a veriety (sic) of gr ...

Garden Path (2001)

A depiction of the creative process of hand-painting film giant, Stan Brakhage. Inspired by Monet's paintings from Giverny, Brakhage's luminous abstract painting transforms the screen into an oneiric botanical landscape. Brakhage's painted loops leap out o ...

Lovesong 5 & 6 (2001)

A hand-painted work beginning with a thicket of curled black lines over flesh tones shaping briefly into sex organs. There is a sense of pulsing darkness which breaks ints curled lines into coupling body forms which then settle back into something like the ...

Dark Night of The Soul (2001)

This hand-painted work presents the semblance of a dark brown wall, ripped open and pocked with yellowed visions of rooms and other interiors, gradually (and always occasionally) intersperced with multiply colored holes, revealing exteriors beyond the shif ...

Lovesong 4 (2001)

A natural companion piece to Lovesong 3, this (also hand-painted) work counterbalances the rhythmic irregularities and, one might say, temporal despairs with a steadiness of beat, creating an absolute progression of formal feeling and meaning. The sense of ...

Lovesong (2001)

This lush, sensuous film is based on paintings of unusual variety and intricacy. Brakhage's desire to include all the complexities of living in his work is evident in this "love song. ...

Lovesong 3 (2001)

Three qualities of hand- painted imagery inter-weave throughout this film: (1) a mash of thick lines delineating colored shapes, (2) thin black lines, like drawings, which most suggest recognizable body-parts, and (3) globs of pure color at inter-play with ...

Occam's Thread (2001)

Occam's Thread (2001)

This is a hand painted, step printed work which views Occam's economical vision of life (The Razor's Edge') as something more thread-like: a staggered black line, growing steadily more solid, albeit often tangled trails vertically across the film surface, ...

Rounds (2001)

ROUNDS is a hand-painted film composed of a series of film loops printed in such a fashion that, while there is a feeling of repetitive familiarity, no actual example of specific repetition is easily seeable. The colored abstract forms seem as if figures a ...

Night Mulch (2001)

Night Mulch (2001)

This film is hand-painted and is essentially about the interplay between hypnagogic vision and words, the effect of the one upon the other, the contest between the two. The hypnagogic (hand-paint) shapes are multiple and variably complex that they tend to ...

Very (2001)

Hand painted short with snippets of found footage interspersed. ...

Jesus Trilogy and Coda (2000)

The Jesus Trilogy and Coda is composed of the four following parts: (1) IN JESUS NAME presents an almost continuous fluttering movement midst the complexity of multiple small shapes in mostly autumnal colors, like unto a wind moving through fall leaves. ...

Persian Series #10 (2000)

"Twigs" of color in space, and pure white "ghosts" of them in the background interspersed with dark amalgams of these and conglomerate forms. The resolve of these themes is a combination of "amalgams" and "ghosts" at one in interplay, and then dark slashed ...

Persian Series #11 (2000)

Persian Series #11 begins with a "window" of yellow paint adrift in the full frame of multicolored paint-shapes. Alternating black-space/white-space exists as a back-drop for slashes and curves of color - reds and blues shifting to red-blue-green, then yel ...

Persian Series #12 (2000)

Persian Series #12 (2000)

"Hot" by-play of reds-greens-yellows in black, blurred, finally, as the color shapes are shifted violently from side to side, finally ending of a sharp entanglement of multicolored twig-like and/or stem-like forms. ...

The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him (2000)

This film of single-strand photography begins with the "fire" of reflective light on water and on the barest inferences of a ship. Throughout, the interwoven play of light and water tell the inferred "tale" of the film through rhythm, the tempo, through vi ...

Water for Maya (2000)

Water for Maya is a hand-painted work which came into being during a film interview with Martina Kudlacek about Maya Deren. There was a sudden recognition of Maya's intrinsic love of water and thus of all Mayan liquidity in magic conjunction, reflection, e ...

Persian Series #6 (2000)

Persian Series #6 begins with what appears to be dried red and yellow rose petals, suddenly shot-thru with blue which causes a shift to violets and greens. This mash of colors thickens and is scored by white and then black, calligraphic lines, which are "e ...

Persian Series #7 (2000)

Persian Series #7 (2000)

Very pale, thin, hieroglyphic pinks, greens and blues in a white space which is thickened over by ribbed mashes of these colors which "dissolve" into varied shapes almost suggesting landscapes and ephemeral bouquets. Dark blurred shapes mix with each other ...

Persian Series #8 (2000)

Persian Series #8 (2000)

Pale petal and stem-like shapes counter punted rhythmically by an even paler "background" of truly ephemeral of truly ephemeral (almost invisible) shapes. Again, the foreground movement is clockwise and often "ribbed" as the film darkens into a blend of fo ...

Persian Series #9 (2000)

Persian Series #9 (2000)

Sharp edged "chunks" of color set in black, straight, often multicolored, lines piercing shapes, imprisoning them, until they are fragmented bits of color in black: repeat of this theme again and again until darkness prevails, but is then broken open by pu ...

Dance (2000)

This film begins with points of light defining a dark space out of which a female dancer (Vivienne Palmer) emerges dressed in a semi-transparent green dress. Her dance is visually 'echoed' by close-up superimpositions of her arms, legs, and feet, and then ...

The Lion and the Zebra Make God's Raw Jewels (1999)

This film is a hand-painted combination of shapes which suggest, as appropriately colored, jungle, open veldt, horizontals of grasses, shag-shape yellow of lion's mane, the black & white stripes of the zebra, the eyes, the teeth, the tearing open into raw ...

Moilsome Toilsome (1999)

Moilsome Toilsome (1999)

This is a photographed filmic searching-for-whales, the camerawork and editing attempting to approximate something of the rubbing up against water of the whale, of the surface foam and the hard coils of water through which it swims, of the gray-greens and ...

Persian Series #1 (1999)

This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes interspersed by darkness, then becomes lit lightning-like by sharp multiply-colored twigs-of shape, all resolving into ...

Persian Series #2 (1999)

Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, almost black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013. ...

Persian Series #3 (1999)

Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed weave of tones moving from oranges & yellows to blue-greens, then retreating (dissolves of zooming away) to both rounded and soft-edged shapes shot with black. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013. ...

Persian Series #4 (1999)

Elaborate petal-like and multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous shape from the Persian Series. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013 ...

Persian Series #5 (1999)

Dark blood red slow shifting tones (often embedded in dark) / (often shot-thru with parallel wave-like lines) composed of all previous shapes and flowers as if trying, linearly, to evolve a glyph-script. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013. ...

The Earthsong of the Cricket (1999)

This is a hand-painted work whose shapes are scratched on black leader filled with varieties of color: the resultant shapes tend to suggest insect-like movements, a rub of bent-lines together suggesting the electric hind legs of the cricket, whose movement ...

The Birds Of Paradise (1999)

This is a hand-painted work which involves a variety of colors applied within gouged and scratched shapes which approximate both swift shifts of bird-shape (legs, beaks and feather-spreads especially) and the Bird of Paradise flower-form as well, the forme ...

The Dark Tower (1999)

This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with streaks of light and vibrantly colored forms. There appears, frame center, the tapered shape of a tower-- An imposing silhouette against the backdrop of the flaring sky. ...

Coupling (1999)

A hand-painted work prepared by my imagination of the sex act affecting internal organs of the human bodies. ...

Stately Mansions Did Decree (1999)

Stately Mansions Did Decree (1999)

This hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which emerges a series of landscapes, gardens, exteriors of mansions, castles and the like, then (as yellow predominat ...

Cloud Chamber (1999)

This hand-painted step-printed film begins in a field of white light slightly bespeckled with ephemeral glazes of flecks of silver which gradually give way to pale suggestions of pastel colors. These take shape occasionally and flicker the forthcoming bits ...

Worm and Web Love (1999)

WORM AND WEB LOVE begins with bracketed light, a throbbing worm in the sand and sea foam mixed with grass and oceanic detritus, soon superimposed upon the dark blue-toned face of a man, then a woman (Michael McClure and Amy Evans McClure), each seen, then ...

Cricket Requiem (1999)

CRICKET REQUIEM is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed film which juxtaposes bent, sometimes saw-tooth, scratch shapes multiply colored in pastels on a white field juxtaposed with emerging, and sometimes retreating, bi-pack imagery of the faintest ...

"..." Reel 3 (1998)

"The third and shortest section reintroduces camera-derived imagery and, minimal as it may be (sunlight shimmering on water, seagull wheeling in the sky), it's still a shock to see "something." Brakhage continues to play with surfaces, layering the image w ...

"..." Reel 5 (1998)

Reel #5 of (...) is composed of scratch-imagery edited to music by James Tenney. The music starts accompanied only by black leader: then there is a sudden flare of pure white which begins to flicker with negative-colored ephemeral shapes, until finally the ...

The Female Mystique and Spare Leaves (for Gordon) (1998)

Here are a couple films from the mid-'60s, given to Gordon Rosenblum at the time, which surfaced this year needing preservation. I don't know what to make of either of them except some insistent quality of "poem" each somehow is. Preserved by the Academy ...

"..." Reel 1 (1998)

"..." Reel 1 (1998)

This work is in five reels (numbered, but called "reels" so that they don't take on the connotations of "Parts" - thus each simply a part of the "trail" of colored scratches, white scratches ((on black & white leader) which suggest, to me, a passage). The ...

"..." Reel 4 (1998)

Reel #4 of (...) is a recapitulation of the primary variations of scratched (on black leader) shapes and additive colors (i.e. those which are composed of toned light in the step printing process) as well as the solarizations (i.e. the combination of negat ...

"..." Reel 2 (1998)

"A second 20-minute reel is more staccato mad chicken-scratch calligraphy fluttering out of a yellow void, sketchy lightning bolts or fireworks interrupted by a sudden field of turquoise." - J. ...

Self Song/Death Song (1997)

Self Song/Death Song (1997)

SELF SONG documents a body besieged by cancer. The amber glow of flesh suggests both victory and submission to death. Blackness surrounds the image and takes it over altogether. Furthermore, the complex grooves and patterns of the flesh struggle to maintai ...

Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (1997)

This film, a combination of hand-painting and photography, is a fulsome exposition of the themes of DOG STAR MAN. In that early epic I had envisioned The World Tree as dead, fit only for firewood; and at end of DOG STAR MAN I had chopped it up amidst a flu ...

The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm (1997)

Flares of color break into streams of light, leaves, wood grain and prism-etched vegetation. A moon lifts out of this dark weave to be replaced by autumn leaves against a grainy sky, a fiery sky. A gray cat licks itself. A black cat sits quickly down on a ...

Last Hymn to the Night - Novalis (1997)

"I tried to imagine what the last hymn to Novalis's night had been if it was beyond language. (…) is the most elaborate hand painted film I've ever made". ...

Divertimento (1997)

Divertimento (1997)

This, painted in the hospital while recovering from cancer surgery in 1996, is - it seems to me - very related to De Kooning's Alzheimer's paintings. The mind, here, is seeking a "blank" and/or holding fast to tendrils of meaning which are stripped so bare ...

Comingled Containers (1996)

Comingled Containers is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage. "This 'return to photography' (after several years of only painting film) was made on the eve of cancer surgery - a kind of 'last testament,' if you will… an envisionment of the fleetin ...

Prelude 1 (1996)

Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular "watermarks" of blotched paint giving-way to multi-colored brush strokes and finally fulsomely darkened and thickened brush-strokes which then thin to something a ...

Prelude 2 (1996)

Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes which gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues. ...

Prelude 3 (1996)

Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst "clouds" of color, finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them. ...

Prelude 4 (1996)

Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their "weave" with each other which is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears of color. ...

Prelude 5 (1996)

This section is very similar to Prelude 4 except that it is composed of extremely thin-lined colors and sharply delineated shapes which are constantly interrupted by "cloud"-like forms. ...

Prelude 6 (1996)

Interplay of mostly horizontal lines inter-woven with "watermark" forms in a wide variety of tones which gradually tend to dissolve into blues at the end. ...

Prelude 7 (1996)

The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as "pictures", but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by the colors of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ...

Prelude 8 (1996)

...as removed as possible from any recognition of either exterior scene of interior feedback phenomena. It is, in its ineffability, as close to pure visual music as I can make it, more inspired by The Preludes of Bach or The Preludium of Buxtehude than any ...

Prelude 9 (1996)

...again, is "plein-aire abstraction" as defined above (painted in New York City) – with, for example, even a correctly toned green impression of The Statue of Liberty – and, then, impressions of Toronto with its architectural particularities appearing ...

Prelude 10 (1996)

Prelude 10 is a double-printed film with an extreme mixture of darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and very white bursts of light and fleeting colored forms. ...

Prelude 11 (1996)

Thick weaves of multicolored lines and dull-colored blobs play off against each other. ...

Prelude 12 (1996)

Prelude 12 (1996)

A bursting of mostly golden light forms as if heralding sunlight itself in their hurried (single-frame) display. ...

Prelude 13 (1996)

Singly-printed multi-colored watery "blobs" and "feathery" streaks of painted color, dominated by yellows and reds interweaving in complexity until there's an evolution of hard-edge autumn leaf patterns which dissipate into patterns similar to the beginnin ...

Prelude 14 (1996)

Prelude 14 begins in deep brilliant red which darkens into deeper reds and lavender shapes, disrupted by a variety of colors settling into browns and grays and shapes most rock-like, all of which is then shot-thru with sufficient yellow to break up all har ...

Shockingly Hot (1996)

This little hand-painted film was over-a-year in the making, and absolutely dependent upon a quality of "broad-stroke" in the painting which I think only children really capable of achieving, at least insofar as such stroke can approximate flame. These str ...

Prelude 15 (1996)

Prelude 15 (1996)

Doubly-printed striations of "brush-strokes" through multicolored "rock" forms dissolving then to blackened "mud" eliciting increasing sense of being under earth. ...

Prelude 16 (1996)

Prelude 16 (1996)

Singly-printed criss-crosses of molten "brush"-(hard-edge)-strokes of black over pebbled yellow, ending finally on an intermix of all intertwined forms with increasing lightness/whiteness. ...

Prelude 17 (1996)

Prelude 17 (1996)

Double-printed thinnest possible lines and multiple dots of pale color interwoven with sweeps of linear tones in swiftly transversing motion, all deepening from this almost white field of flitting activity to some solidification of forms. ...

Prelude 18 (1996)

Prelude 18 (1996)

Singly-printed evolution from a deep blue-blackness of hard-edge twisting and sweeping bars and deep black swirls of dry-cracked and electrically "webbed" blotches, giving way to mixtures of bright blue and deep black sweeps of almost hieroglyphic forms mi ...

Prelude 19 (1996)

Prelude 19 (1996)

Prelude 19 begins with hand-painted swatches of variable colors encompassed eventually by vertical strokes of reds and blues, followed by sudden clearings which are counterpointed by sections of multiple blobs of color, these effects alternating again and ...

Prelude 20 (1996)

Prelude 20 (1996)

Prelude 20 begins with pale washes of hand-painted tones overlaid eventually by sharp forms, a kind of sliced color becoming more and more smeared. ...

Prelude 21 (1996)

Prelude 21 (1996)

Prelude 21 is most characterized by the double-time of single-frame printing of extremely thick swatches of multiple colors as if in a furiously boiling cauldron. ...

Prelude 22 (1996)

Prelude 22 (1996)

Prelude 22 is a singly-printed hand-painted thick black and gold swatches of color which evolve into forms that are horizontally and vertically sliced, smeared, cut-off until color "runs" sensuously in snake-like shapes, coils, soforth. ...

Prelude 23 (1996)

Prelude 23 (1996)

Prelude 23 is doubly-printed hand-painted frames causing an effect almost as if wisps of tone were tinting the film intercut with sharp thin lines which "fatten," then, into thick crowded layers of paint, senses of great visual depth. ...

Prelude 24 (1996)

Prelude 24 (1996)

Prelude 24 returns to the tempo of single-frame printing. Its shapes and forms are composed of nearly black torques of ink, flickering with white and only faintly, now and again, tinged with color. ...

Blue Value (1996)

Blue Value (1996)

This is a hand-painted step-printed film which begins with slow dissolves of what appear to be decaying leaves, crumpled browns and golds and oranges which assume qualities of earth and rock shot-through with flashes of crystalline prism colors and jagged ...

Sexual Saga (1996)

This hand-painted step-printed film begins with "explosions" of white, yellow, orange (deepening into reds), vermillion, and darker red flame shapes. Then there are anatomical beseeming solid yellows against flickering reds. Multiple dissolves of all previ ...

Two Found Objects of Charles Boultenhouse (1996)

Two Found Objects of Charles Boultenhouse (1996)

A thin oval of green-tinged light in thick darkness persists, then gradually descends below the bottom of the frame and, after a pause, rises again to its original position. Out of the surrounding darkness a figure slowly emerges, a woman in a purple robe ...

Polite Madness (1996)

A hand-painted elaborately step-printed film which begins in blues and greens with golden geographic-beseeming continents which evolve into symmetricals and dark passages (including a whirling tunnel) whitening to create many bas-relief (photographic solar ...

The Fur of Home (1996)

The Fur of Home (1996)

A hand-painted double-frame printed film which begins with textures reminiscent of a gray shag rug that is fretted by green and golden flashes-of-shape deepening into darker solid purples and even black solidities at brief intervals: this evolves into blac ...

Concrescence (1996)

"concrescence, principle of As a term from A.N. Whitehead's metaphysics refers to the drive things possess that impel them to actualization, the creative urge towards concrescence, for producing novel advances through the generation of greater interrelated ...

Beautiful Funerals (1996)

BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-cros ...

Through Wounded Eyes (1996)

Through Wounded Eyes (1996)

"This film is a collaboration between Joel Haertling and Stan Brakhage. It is a hand-painted film incorporating treated film images of trees in Fall colors and scratched film. It has four levels of superimposed image. Inspired by an eye aberration caused b ...

I Take These Truths (1995)

This film is entirely hand-painted and is composed of such an evolution of variably colored shapes that their inter-action with each other should constitute a purely visual "self-evident" (as prompted by the title). Each frame is printed twice, so that its ...

I... (1995)

By painting and scratching directly on celluloid strips and then duplicating each image for two or more frames, Brakhage produced a flickering cycle of abstract shapes that bespeak the restlessness of his own character and sensibility; the titles of the se ...

We Hold These (1995)

Part 2 of Trilogy. Dedicated to Phil Solomon. The "Truths" of this film, which the title prompts, are slightly recognizable patterns of fish and animal biology, plant and flower shapes, and human anatomy which are interwoven with pastel cubes and other ge ...

The 'b' Series (1995)

The 'b' Series (1995)

This film is a series of five little hand-painted and elaborately step-printed sections which are individually titled but so inter-related I've decided they should always be shown in this order together, but each such a distinction of the essentially un-na ...

In Consideration of Pompeii (1995)

In Consideration of Pompeii (1995)

Since the age of 17/18, I've been haunted by the catastrophe of Pompeii – beginning with photographs (sold as pornography in high school) of the mummified lovers caught in coitus and preserved by the volcanic ash, revivified by many ghostly photographic ...

Paranoia Corridor (1995)

This film is an elaborately hand-painted step-printed work composed primarily of luminescent greens and blues in constantly shifting symmetrical shapes which suggest, rather than delineate, passage through a corridor. An increasingly menacing evolution of ...

The "Lost" Films (1995)

They are travelogues in photographic fact and in the mind. Unable to afford printing them, I had stuck them in a drawer. The first was made in 1991, the second through sixth in 1992, seven and eight in '93, and the ninth in '92. ...

Earthen Aerie (1995)

This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with several seconds of blank white (interrupted by red and brief electric yellow) and then proceeds to multiply flecked earth and rock shapes and root-like forms which seem to suck horizontally inward and upward ...

Black Ice (1994)

Inspired by a bad fall on a patch of black ice (that ultimately resulted in Brakhage's need for eye surgery), the filmmaker gives us something of a dreamlike descent through the fear and refractions of closed-eye vision regarding such an event. ...

From: First Hymn to the Night – Novalis (1994)

"This is a hand-painted film whose emotionally referential shapes and colors are interwoven with words (in English) from the first Hymn to the Night by the late 18th century mystic poet Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, whose pen name was Novalis. The piec ...

Chartres Series (1994)

A year and a half ago the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted I must see the Chartres Cathedral. I, who had studied picture books of its great stained-glass windows, sculpture and architecture for years, having also read Henry Ad ...

The Mammals of Victoria (1994)

The film begins with a series of horizontally running ocean tide waves, sometimes with mountains in the background, hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painting, abstractions composed of distorted (jammed) TV shapes in shades of blue with oc ...

Naughts (1994)

A series of five hand-painted, step-printed films, each of which is a textured, thus tangible, "nothing." A series of "nots," then, in pun, or knots of otherwise invisible energies. ...

Elementary Phrases (1994)

Colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the two began with strips of film Brakhage had painted on by hand, photographing them frame by frame with Solomon's optical printer. They often printed two strips of film together, some of them containin ...

Cannot Exist (1994)

The hand-painting of this film is interrupted by, and interspersed with, a geometrically structured Mask of Death (one of those frightening human idea-shapes of dying) immediately caught-up in threads of streaming, polarized crystals of Light (elaborately ...

Cannot Not Exist (1994)

In this non-orange negative of a hand-painted film, a series of luminously pastel shapes – often patches of color against a stark white background – are interspersed with nearly black intermittent smudges punctuating white. These visual themes develop ...

Alternating Currents (1994)

Alternating Currents (1994)

This was an unfinished collaboration with Stan Brakhage. This film was actually screened publicly at least a few times, including at Pacific Film Archive (11/15/1994, described as a premiere), MoMA (5/3/1999, also described as a premiere – probably a rev ...

Stellar (1993)

This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes partial use of painted frames in repetition (for "close-up" of textures). The tone of the film is primarily ...

Autumnal (1993)

This is a film composed of two elements: (1) simple hand-painted frames and brief strips of hand-painting, and (2) strips of blank colors, which appear as overall hues or color tones filtering light itself rather than any pictured scenes. These two element ...

Three Homerics (1993)

This film is composed of three sections created to accompany a piece of music (by Barbara Feldman) on a Homeric poem. ...

The Harrowing (1993)

A hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to create varieties of tempo in mimic of sparking and molten rock. ...

Tryst Haunt (1993)

A hand-painted film photographically step-printed so that the thicket-like lines of paint are "played-off" against some centered pale-hued areas of paint in such a way as to suggest a clearing in a forest of branches. ...

Boulder Blues and Pearls and... (1993)

Peripheral envisionment of daily life as the mind has it - i.e., a terrifying ecstasy of (hand-painted) synapting nerve ends back-firing from thought's grip of life. ...

Study in Color and Black and White (1993)

A hand-painted and photographically step-printed film, which exhibits variably shaped small areas of color (in a dark field) that explode into full frames of textured color interwoven with white scratch patterns that create a sense of interior depth and th ...

Ephemeral Solidity (1993)

This is one of the most elaborately edited of all the hand-painted films of late - a Haydenesque complexity of thematic variations on a totally visual (i.e., un-musical) theme. This film is composed of 35mm hand-painted images reduced to 16mm film, single ...

Blossom-Gift/Favor (1993)

Dedicated to Doug Edwards. All titles dominate linguistically; in that sense, any film would be better left unnamed. This little hand-painted work attempts to BE a visual "flowering," and as it is (as Film is) a continuity art, it would seek some visual c ...

For Marilyn (1992)

The film is officially untitled, but is referred to by the dedication that appears in place of a title card. It is dedicated to Marilyn Brakhage, the filmmaker's wife. Out of all the 350+ films that Stan Brakhage made, this was his personal favorite. ...

Interpolations 1-5 (1992)

Interpolations 1-5 (1992)

"The full 35-millimeter frame allows for more detail and diversity than Brakhage's customary narrower gauges. In the first section, multicolored blobs contrast with fuzzy photographed lights; in the third, flickering specks become hundreds of tiny rods and ...

Christ Mass Sex Dance (1991)

This work, composed of six rolls of superimposed images set to Tenney's electronic music track 'Blue Suede', is a celebration of the balletic restraints of adolescent sexuality — (shaped in this instance) by 'The Nutcracker Suite' of Tchaikovsky as well ...

Agnus Dei Kinder Synapse (1991)

Agnus Dei Kinder Synapse (1991)

To the child mind, the transformative sacrificial power of "O, Lamb of God" is a daily manifestation - not as an adult shift-of-interest, but rather as ritual magic in which a toy train ("-of-thought," an adult might say) becomes medium of shifts-of-scene, ...

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991)

Four superimposed rolls of hand-painted and bi-packed television negative imagery are edited so as to approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions of luminescent light. ...

Crack Glass Eulogy (1991)

A nostalgic envisionment of city living - the potential shards of memory seen as if always on the verge of cutting the mind to pieces. ...

A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea (1991)

"In his description for A CHILD'S GARDEN, Brakhage quotes from poets Ronald Johnson and Charles Olson (and cites Johnson's poem "Beam 29" as inspiration). But the film also vaguely calls to mind William Blake—more perhaps for his art than his poetry: the ...

Passage Through: A Ritual (1990)

"[Passage Through] required the most exacting editing process ever; and in the course of that work it occurred to me that I'd originally made 'The Riddle of Lumen' hoping someone would make an 'answering' film and entertain my visual riddle in the manner o ...

Vision of the Fire Tree (1990)

"Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe." - D.H. Lawrence This little film, like a fire in the mind, seeks that "tree" along a line of metaphorical synaps ...

Glaze of Cathexis (1990)

This hand-painted work is easily the most minutely detailed ever given to me to do, for it traces (as best I'm able) the hypnagogic after-effect of psychological cathexis as designed by Freud in his first (and unfinished) book on the subject - "Toward a Sc ...

Visions in Meditation #3: Plato's Cave (1990)

Brakhage begins here with Carlsbad Caverns as a stand-in for Plato's Cave and then responds to the philosopher's notion of inaccessible ideal forms by seeking out imagery that evokes worlds we cannot see. ...

Visions in Meditation #4: D.H. Lawrence (1990)

Photographing near Taos, New Mexico, where D.H. Lawrence lived, and in the room in which his ashes may be entombed, Brakhage also cites a statement of the writer's in connection with the film: "There must be mutation swifter than iridescence, haste, not re ...

City Streaming (1990)

This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak - a memory piece, a "piecing-together" of the experience of living there. The consciousness of the maker comes to sharply focused visual music - not to arrive at snapshots, as such, but rather to "si ...

Babylon Series #2 (1990)

Out of the vagueries of sometime beseeming repetitive light patterns, and the delicately variable rhythms of thought process, the imagination of The Monumental and of the Ephemeral are born to mind hard as nails. ...

Babylon Series #3 (1990)

This is an architectural garden of the variably brash rock-solid liquid-encompassing, but always imitative, human mind as it processes the given light thoughtfully. This film is about that. ...

The Thatch of Night (1990)

As a poem might be said to contain the night through a weave of words, so have I in this film attempted such a container with warp and woof of emblematic visions. ...

Visions in Meditation (1990)

"I have made my Visions in Meditation in homage to Gertrude Stein's whole meditative oeuvre epitomized by her Stanzas in Meditation. ...

Babylon Series #1 (1989)

After a six -or seven- year study of Hammurabi's Code, original Babylonian Text and translation, I've tried to feel my way into the moving visual thought process of this ancient culture (whose numerical system is composed primarily of building materials, n ...

Faust IV (1989)

Music by Rick Corrigan. This is the imaged thought process of young Faust escaping the unbearable pictures of his broken romantic idyll, mentally fleeing the particulars of his dramatized "love," Faust's mind ranging the geography of his upbringing and its ...

Visions in Meditation #1 (1989)

This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein's "Stanzas In Meditation", in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes and human symbolism "indicative of that field-of-consciousness within which humanity survives thoughtfully." ...

Visions in Meditation #2: Mesa Verde (1989)

Visiting the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado, abandoned about 1275, Brakhage thought, "There is terror here." And so he returns again and again to those empty stone homes. ...

I... Dreaming (1988)

Phrases of Stephen Foster, set to music by Joel Heartling, are set to film in this autobiographical piece: a solitary female voice, occasionally joined by a chorus, sings phrases of sorrow as we watch a solitary man in shadows in an unadorned house: he str ...

Faust 3: Candida Albacore (1988)

Just as the word Idyll of Faust's Part 2 is rooted in the Greek idein/to see, so is "candida" in candidatus, as used in the white robed army of martyrs' of the Te Deum, as well as Albicare/to be white or Albicore out of the Portuguese (or Arabic origin) de ...

Faust's Other: An Idyll (1988)

"Faust Part 2" reveals the modern Faust in a romantic interlude, an idyll (from the Greek idein, "to see"); also, a journey of the id. A sense of story is inferred through the complex interweaving of human gesture, expression, and bodily movement within vi ...

Rage Net (1988)

Another of Brakhage's works of "moving visual thinking," Rage Net reminds one of the vibrant pioneering experiments of European animators of the 1920s. ...

Marilyn's Window (1988)

This stream-of-consciousness could be nothing less than pathway of the soul, as images of Marilyn's window are remembered from inside-out, its "view" interwoven with all of other windowing and the Elements of the known world. ...

Matins (1988)

This is one of those "little films" which is pure "cine poem" in the sense that it is picture, but also given over to what we call "abstract" - which is to say it arises as mind's light and exists, as such, as filmic "prayer." (Made on the occasion of, and ...

The Dante Quartet (1987)

A visual representation, in four parts, of one man's internalization of "The Divine Comedy." Hell is a series of multicolored brush strokes against a white background; the speed of the changing images varies. "Hell Spit Flexion," or springing out of Hell, ...

Loud Visual Noises (1987)

Hand-painted — closed-eye — film envisioning optic feedback in response to sound. Collaborative soundtrack compiled by Joel Haertling with sound contributions by Die Tödliche Doris (WG), Zoviet France (UK), Nurse With Wound (UK), The Hafler Trio (NL), ...

Faustfilm: An Opera (1987)

This is the realization of a 30 year old dream, a wish of the young filmmaker to film a modern Faust which finally came to a fulfillment as unpredictable and as absolute as, say, three decades of living experience. Like earlier artists who have treated the ...

Kindering (1987)

Refracted images, not unlike those in a funhouse mirror, display two children playing in a backyard, a boy and a girl. There's a dog, a swing, a picket fence, a Big Wheels trike. The grass is green and lush. A soundtrack mixes a chorus, swelling strings, a ...

The Loom (1986)

A multiple-superimposition hand-painted visual symphony of animal life of earth. THE LOOM might be compared to musical quartet-form (as there are almost always four superimposed pictures); but the complexity of texture, multiplicity of tone, and the variet ...

Dance Shadows by Danelle Helander (1986)

Dance Shadows by Danelle Helander (1986)

At the Art Cinema in Boulder, Colorado, the Sunday Associates staged an adaptation of Jane Brakhage's story of Caesar's invasion of Britain, "Caswallon the Headhunter." I contributed a hand-painted film loop, as part of the special effects, as well as maki ...

Fireloop (1986)

Part two of the Caswallon Trilogy, and the only film in the group to also be printed as a stand-alone. Features sound. ...

Night Music (1986)

Part of Three Hand-Painted Films, Night Music (originally painted on IMAX) attempts to capture the beauty of sadness, as the eyes have it when closed in meditation on sorrow. ...

Confession (1986)

"Firstly, I revealed in salutary confession the secret filth of my misdeed, which had long been festering in stagnant silence; and I made it my custom to confess often, and thus to display the wounds of my blinded soul..." (Petrarch, 1352, in a letter to h ...

The Aerodyne (1986)

The Aerodyne (1986)

At the Art Cinema in Boulder, Colorado, the Sunday Associates staged an adaptation of Jane Brakhage's story of Caesar's invasion of Britain, "Caswallon the Headhunter." I contributed a hand-painted film loop, as part of the special effects, as well as maki ...

Jane (1985)

Someone said to me, of this film, that it was really about light; but Jane (who takes it as a portrait – i. e., sees herself in it) said: You gave me the moon and seven stars... and I signed this film, simply, Stan. ...

Tortured Dust (1984)

The culmination of a series of autobiographical films that Brakhage made about his family (collectively known as The Book of Family), Tortured Dust was shot as the filmmaker's children from his first marriage were beginning to leave the house, and edited d ...

Tortured Dust Part 1 (1984)

Tortured Dust Part 1 (1984)

While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling." Coming upon the following passage in her book, he found renewed energy to continue and complet ...

Tortured Dust Part 2 (1984)

Tortured Dust Part 2 (1984)

While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling." Coming upon the following passage in her book, he found renewed energy to continue and complet ...

Tortured Dust Part 3 (1984)

Tortured Dust Part 3 (1984)

While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling." Coming upon the following passage in her book, he found renewed energy to continue and complet ...

Tortured Dust Part 4 (1984)

Tortured Dust Part 4 (1984)

While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling." Coming upon the following passage in her book, he found renewed energy to continue and complet ...

Egyptian Series (1984)

A series of meditations on Egyptian hieroglyphs – designations (as I finally saw them) of nurturing godheads. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 14 (1982)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 15 (1982)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 16 (1982)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 17 (1982)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 18 (1982)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 19 (1982)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Nodes (1981)

"nodus knot, node - more at NET) ... 4a: a point at which subsidiary parts originate or center ... 5: a point, line, or surface of a vibrating body that is free or relatively free from vibratory motion." In the tradition of SKEIN this hand-painted film is ...

Unconscious London Strata (1981)

This film, photographed in London, is an exploration into the depths of unconscious reactions. ...

Made Manifest (1981)

"Every man's work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. ...

Aftermath (1981)

"after + math (((mowing, crop))) a second growth crop" ... this my strongest attack on pop culture, the movies, TV, etc. - what CAN be done with it? / The idealism of moving-visual-thought-process, the very raw meat of brain, trying to absorb and transform ...

Arabic Numeral Series 12 (1981)

This is the twelfth film in the twenty-part Arabics series. Brakhage creates blurry visual fields that are profoundly without ground, worlds of unidentifiable, ever-shifting shapes, and oceans of light and darkness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 7 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 8 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 9 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 0 + 10 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 11 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 13 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 1 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 2 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 3 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 4 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 5 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

Arabic Numeral Series 6 (1981)

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. ...

The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981)

A collage of two-dimensional images of vegetation, each appearing only for a moment, sometimes as a single image, more often with other bits of stem, leaf, bud, or petal. Often we see only the outline of objects against a black background. Black and green ...

RR (1981)

This film is a mix of landscape images seen from train windows and the patterned shapes and shifting tones of moving-visual-thought thus prompted; it was inspired by Robert Breer's FUJI. ...

Murder Psalm (1980)

Inspired in part by a dream he had of murdering his mother, Brakhage here gives us one of his profoundest meditations on human aggression. ...

Duplicity III (1980)

The final Duplicity film does seem at resolve with the term. All previous visual manifestations have been extended to their limits, through four-roll superimpositions. Obvious costumes and masks. Drama as an ultimate bid for truth, and totemic recognition ...

Roman Numeral: IV (1980)

It was while studying this film that I decided to group these 'romans' under the title Roman Numeral Series and to give up the term 'imagnostic' altogether… also to dedicate the series to Don Yannacito who had seen something 'concrete' and even narrative ...

Roman Numeral: V (1980)

An imagery sharp as stars and hard as the thought-universe (turning back upon itself) absorbed in gentle patterns of contemplation. – S.B. ...

Roman Numeral: VI (1980)

What shall one say? – S.B. ...

Roman Numeral: VII (1980)

What can one say? – that won't limit by language the complexity of moving visual thinking?… the skein of pattern that seeks to make its own language. – S.B. ...

Roman Numeral: VIII (1980)

Roman Numeral: VIII (1980)

This is the most formal of all these works. - S.B. ...

Roman Numeral: IX (1980)

This is the most absolute. – S.B. ...

Sincerity V (1980)

This, then, finishes eleven years of editing drawing on 30-some years of photography. I will surely work autobiographically again, but the modes of SINCERITY and DUPLICITY seem completed with this film which on the one hand is as simple in its integrity-of ...

Salome (1980)

Portrait of the great chess master, aesthetician, human being, Eugene Salome. ...

Sincerity (1980)

Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage utilized previously unused personal archival footage to construct the autobiographical Sincerity. ...

4A (1980)

A hand-painted Brakhage film made specifically for Anthology Film Archives. ...

Roman Numeral: I (1979)

An attempt to conjure pictorially, from the mind, an image that isn't referential: "...I'd like to give something back, not a picture of a flower, but some flower that couldn't exist except on film." - S.B. "I'm not sure if this work is titled I for Imagn ...

Roman Numeral: II (1979)

Now that "II" has been completed, one would suppose that the above film "I" is "One"... unless, of course, this film's spoken title is "aye-aye" or even, perhaps, slyly referring to the two "eyes" which made it, as distinct from the singularity of vision w ...

Sincerity IV (1979)

This, the sixth film of the SINCERITY/DUPLICITY series, seems rooted in the earliest tradition of my work, Psycho-Drama, as well as in the most recent, Imagnostic, directions taken. It is remembrance as well as thought which fashions it in lonely hotel roo ...

Creation (1979)

"The ecstatic, mythic montage of Alaskan landscapes" is also "about the act of making" and an antidote to the stodgy notion that life crawled forth from a warm primordial soup. ...

Roman Numeral: III (1979)

The third in this series of Imagnostic Films seems particularly magic to me in as much as I cannot even remember the photographic source of these images or, thus, having taken them. – S.B. ...

Burial Path (1978)

The film begins with the image of a dead bird. The mind moves to forget, as well as to remember: this film graphs the process of forgetfulness against all oddities of remembered bird-shape. ...

Thot-Fal'N (1978)

This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblem ...

Centre (1978)

Series of narrative events, stories if you like, but so clustered visually as to have a center so to speak, slightly off center. ...

Bird (1978)

This portrait of a guinea fowl is the first clear vision I've had of the hot-blooded dinosaurs still living among us. ...

Nightmare Series (1978)

A decade and a half ago, poet Robert Kelly told me that the "crucial work" of our time might be what he calls "the dream work": I hope, with this Series, to have entertained his challenge more thoughtfully than with any previous "dream" filmmaking. In homa ...

Sluice (1978)

It is a wooden silver-retrieving sluice, thus light-catch awash with something like "cheek and jowl clippings of Argentine bulls" (as Hollis Frampton reminds us) and many chemical residues of earth. My mind has grown TREE out of the forest of all of it. ...

Sincerity III (1978)

In the autobiographical tradition of the earlier Sincerities, this film takes up the light-threads of our living 14 years ago when the Brakhage family found home and "settled," like they say, into some sense of permanence. This quality of living in one pla ...

Purity and After (1978)

Two short films, the first NOT about purity itself, whatever that might be, but rather an equivalent of the process of searching for purity in the mind ... the second film, then, thought's rebound from that. ...

Duplicity I (1978)

A friend of many years' acquaintance showed me the duplicity of myself. And, midst guilt and anxiety, I came to see that duplicity often shows itself forth in semblance of sincerity. Then a dream informed me that SINCERITY IV, which I had just completed, w ...

Duplicity II (1978)

Duplicity II (1978)

This, the second film of the continuing autobiographical Duplicity series, is composed of superimpositions much as the mind "dupes" remembered experience into some semblance of, say, composed surety rather than imbalanced accuracy - as thought may even war ...

The Governor (1977)

The Governor (1977)

"On July 4, 1976 I and my camera toured the state of Colorado with governor Richard D. Lamm, as he traveled in parades with his children, appeared at dinners, lectured, etc. On July 20, I spent the morning in his office in the state capitol and the afterno ...

Tragoedia (1977)

This film was conceived about 10 years ago when I heard Norman O. Brown define "Tragedy" as "goat-song" (or as Webster has it: "Greek tragoidia fr. tragos goat + aiedein to sing; prob. fr. the satyrs represented by the original chorus"). I disagree with th ...

Soldiers and Other Cosmic Objects (1977)

This begins the fourth chapter of The Book of Film and entertains directly the considerations of chapter two (THE WEIR-FALCON SAGA, THE MACHINE OF EDEN, and THE ANIMALS OF EDEN AND AFTER). Person begins to be defined by what it is not. It might be said tha ...

The Domain of the Moment (1977)

Four films in contemplation upon those events which are so centered upon one moment that chronology seems almost obliterated or at least unimportant in remembrance. ...

The Dream, N.Y.C., The Return, The Flower (1976)

The following films were all made in 1976. I do not wish to describe them. (S.B.) "Has aspects of the diary film...The Dream is one of the most totally disorienting films Brakhage has made...NYC sets various sections within it against each other in a way t ...

Absence (1976)

"This film is about 'nothing.' Hints of dramatic 'loss' are imaged throughout, but the primary effect of the film is to give, through fleeting and ephemeral visions, a sense of something which almost exists but unhappily doesn't." - Marilyn Brakhage "Abse ...

Desert (1976)

Says Fred Camper of the film: "Invited to Riverside, California, Brakhage, under the mistaken impression that it was a desert, was planning a desert movie when he arrived to discover an unattractive suburban landscape. So he decided to make, and shoot, a d ...

Highs (1976)

Mid-period Brakahge short. "Haiku cartoons. ...

Rembrandt, Etc., and Jane (1976)

The following films were all made in 1976. I do not wish to describe them. —SB "Two portrait sketches and two nondescript. ...

Trio (1976)

A woman and two men talking, seen one by one, in a montage of three movements that make up a fast-slow-fast cycle. The second movement is composed of footage of Stan Brakhage shot by filmmaker Bruce Baillie. (Marilyn Brakhage) "P.S. Images of myself in TR ...

Airs (1976)

"This film rises out of my struggle to photograph the ephemeral qualities of varied air (as many Greek philosophers experienced such) and to arrange the resultant textures/tones of film (in sharp conjunction with images hard-edged as words can be) so that ...

Sketches (1976)

Sketches (1976)

Super-8 film by Stan Brakhage. "Brief songs of light and line. ...

Gadflies (1976)

Gadflies (1976)

"Gadflies, a record of a reunion of a group of old high school friends, is filmed with an eye toward the rhythms of conversation, of group gatherings, and with a kind of wit that catches off-guard moments and turns them into faintly unsettling ironies...bu ...

Short Films 1976 (1976)

Short Films 1976 (1976)

Four films verging on portraiture, converging to make a drama for all seasons, starring: Jane Brakhage as The Dreamer; Bob Benson as The Magnificent Stranger; Omar Beagle as The Snow Plow Man; and Jimmy Ryan Morris as The Poet and as Doc Holliday. ...

Short Films 1975 (1975)

Ten deliberately untitled films, each separated on the reel by several ft of black leader. #1 begins with blue negative face of child, ends with single centered eye; #2 begins with blowing snow, ends with lamp stand and lights of the city; #3 begins with l ...

Sincerity II (1975)

This continuation of my autobiography is composed of film photographed by many people: Bruce Baillie, Jane Brakhage, Larry Jordan and Stan Phillips, among others. Most of the footage is drawn from some 20,000 feet of "home movies," "out-takes" and the like ...

Short Films 1975: #9 (Forest Love Scene) (1975)

Begins with rocks, tree trucks, plants in glow of light, ends with green and gold forest scene. ...

Short Films 1975: #10 (Painted Lightning) (1975)

Begins and ends with flashes of scratched 'lighting'. A small portrait of one of the Brakhage kids is sandwiched in between light studies and scratch-homages to Jerome Hill. ...

Short Films 1975: #2 (Dante’s Styx) (1975)

Begins with blowing snow, ends with lamp stand and lights of the city. ...

Short Films 1975: #3 (Hollis Frampton) (1975)

Begins with landscape/sunset thru mist, ends with window sill. ...

Short Films 1975: #4 (Lady in Glass) (1975)

Begins with green tiled bathroom ends with golden mirrored image of cameraman. Has been accidentally referred to as "Jane's Memory" in some writing. ...

Short Films 1975: #5 (Niagara Falls) (1975)

Begins with back of airplane seat, ends with horizontal streaks of bold light. ...

Short Films 1975: #6 (Stars, Chickens, Eyes, Candles) (1975)

Begins with brown light thru quartz crystal, ends with a candle wick burning, circled by boiling gold flecks. ...

The Stars Are Beautiful (1974)

We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the ...

The Text of Light (1974)

Time-lapse photography of books, paintings, reflections, and light falling on textures, shot entirely through a glass ashtray. "'All that is is light.' – Dun Scotus Erigena. 'To see the world in a grain of sand.' – William Blake. These are the primary ...

Hymn to Her (1974)

"HER" to me is always Jane, in the first place, but also Hera: "goddess of women and marriage," naturally enough. Then, too, as it is a hymn of light, and as he/me feels the self that way, it sings of and to itself. ...

Star Garden (1974)

The "star", as it is singular, is the sun; and it is metaphored, at the beginning of this film, by the projector anyone uses to show forth. Then the imaginary sun begins its course throughout whatever darkened room this film is seen within. At "high noon" ...

Skein (1974)

'A loosely coiled length of yarn (story) ... wound on a reel' -- my parenthesis! This is a painted film (inspired by unpainted pictures): 'skins' of paint hung in a weave of light. ...

Clancy (1974)

"This is a portrait of that man I choose to call the greatest I've known: Clancy, whom the fates surnamed Sheey, personifies for me that which is simply human beyond condition and all conditioning. ...

Flight (1974)

Pun on "light" intended - that short preceding expulsion of breath perhaps the "subject matter" of this film which centers in consideration of death. It is the third tone poem film and did much surprise me by thus completing a trilogy of the "4 classical E ...

Sol (1974)

1: SUN 2: not cap: GOLD - used in alchemy 3: the sun-god of the ancient Romans; but then also, as I understand it, a French word for earth, wherefrom we get our "sail"; and then (puns always intended, as I hear them): soul .... This also, then, a tone poem ...

“He was born, he suffered, he died.” (1974)

"The quote is Joseph Conrad answering a critic who found his books too long. Conrad replied that he could write a novel on the inside of a match-book cover, thus (as above), but that he "preferred to elaborate." The "Life" of the film is scratched on black ...

Dominion (1974)

The "Dynamo theories" of Henry Adams portrayed first person/sexual vision: an American businessman as lord of all he surveys. ...

Gift (1973)

A "found object of paint and mold" given to Brakhage by the poet David Meltzer. According to Jane Brakhage, Stan did nothing to it but see it, splice it, and add titles. (From Barrett and Brabner. ...

Sincerity I (1973)

This, the first completed reel of work-in-progress, draws on autobiographical energies and images which reflect the first 20 years of my living. I have three definitions of the word Sincerity to sustain my working along these lines of thought with this aut ...

Sexual Meditation: Open Field (1973)

OPEN FIELD is in the mind, of course, and exists as a weave of trees, grasses, waters, and bodies poised and fleeting at childhood's end. The scene is lit as by sun and moon alike and haunted by the pursuant adult. ...

The Women (1973)

A psychodrama. A being-without-clothes (as inspired by the painter Paul Delvaux). A film which searches thru two women its definitive 'The. ...

The Process (1972)

This film by Stan Brakhage investigates the process of memory and thought by melting a series of images and a field of color. The positive-negative flickering graphs a sort of shutter-window all over the matter of the vision. Jittery flocks of space are i ...

The Riddle of Lumen (1972)

"The Riddle of Lumen" presents an evenly paced sequence of images, which seem to follow an elusive logic. As in "Zorns Lemma" the viewer is called upon to recognize or invent a principle of association linking each shot with its predecessor. However, here ...

Sexual Meditation: Faun's Room, Yale (1972)

This, the third of the Sexual Meditation Series, might also be seen as a triangular portrait of Julia and P. Adams Sitney and Jane Brakhage. ...

Sexual Meditation: Office Suite (1972)

This film evolves from several years' observation of the sexual energy which charges the world of business and the qualities of palatial environ which this energy often creates. It is one of the most perfect films it has been given to me to make. – S.B. ...

The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1972)

At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. "S. Brakhage, entering, WITH HIS CAMERA, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it ex ...

The Wold-Shadow (1972)

A stand of birches. Sunlight brightens and dims, revealing more or less of the woods. A little grass is on the forest floor. Is there a shape in the shadows? Something green is out of focus. The light flashes, and the screen goes dark from time to time. We ...

Sexual Meditation: Hotel (1972)

This film takes its cue from that ultimate situation of Sex/Med/masturbation - the loft-and-lonely hotel room. It is thus easily twice the length and complexity of any other in the series. ...

The Shores of Phos: A Fable (1972)

Phos equals light, but then I did also want that word within the title which would designate place, as within the nationalities of "the fabulous" - a specific country of the imagination with tangible shores, etc. The film adheres strictly to the ordinary f ...

Eye Myth Educational (1972)

"I've printed each single frame 12 times or 8 times [...] This permits people to study a it little more [...] There's a horseman, a woman and a moth in this movie." -S.B. ...

The Presence (1972)

The Presence reflects some sight of Insect as Being. The Imagined aura and environment of a beetle creates a 'world' wherein this solitary insect may simply be seen. ...

Wecht (1972)

The film by Brakhage commonly referred to as "Wecht" does indeed exist. It doesn't have a titlecard at the head, and the leader of the original is labeled "Portrait" in Stan's handwriting, so I'm not sure where the 'Wecht' title comes from. There is a 'by ...

Deus Ex (1971)

I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUX EX. ...

Fox Fire Child Watch (1971)

Ken, Flo and Nisi Jacobs in the Syracuse Airport: this is what you might call baby-sitting in the swamp. ...

The Trip to Door (1971)

Jane and the kids go to town. Directly in the tradition of SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD, this film may indeed constitute a 3rd chapter to 'The Book of Film. ...

Door (1971)

This is the only all-inclusive autobiography I've yet managed; and as I'm still alive, it is to be understood as a metaphor which defines the limits of expectations. ...

Western History (1971)

A thumbnail History of the Western World, all centered around the basketball court. ...

Sexual Meditation: Room with View (1971)

Directly in the tradition of SEXUAL MEDITATION #1: Motel, this "sequel" does explore further possibilities of nudes in a room. ...

The Peaceable Kingdom (1971)

This film, one of the most perfect ever given to me to make, was inspired by the series of paintings of the same title by Edward Hicks. ...

Angels' (1971)

This is then the property of many angels. ...

Eyes (1970)

"After wishing for years to be given the opportunity of filming some of the more "mystical" occupations of our Times – which the average imagination turns into "bogeyman"… viz: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc. – I was at last permitted ...

The Machine of Eden (1970)

"'Mis-takes' give birth to 'shape' (which, in this work, is 'matter,' subject and otherwise) amidst a weave of thought: ... the 'dream' of Eden will speak for itself." The second part of the of The Weir-Falcon Saga trilogy. ...

The Animals of Eden and After (1970)

THE ANIMALS OF EDEN AND AFTER ... is too mysterious, to me, for me to be able to write anything about it except that it seems to be the best film I've ever made. ...

The Weir-Falcon Saga (1970)

The term "The Weir-Falcon Saga" appeared to me, night after night, at the end of a series of dreams: I was "true" to the feeling, tho not the images, of those dreams in the editing of this and the following two films. The three films "go" very directly tog ...

Scenes from Under Childhood (1970)

A visualization of the inner world of foetal beginnings, the infant, the baby, the child – a shattering of the 'myths of childhood' through revelation of the extremes of violent terror and overwhelming joy of that world darkened to most adults by their s ...

Scenes from Under Childhood, Section Four (1970)

Section IV is the longest of the four parts and the one in which the photographic material from the past plays the most prominent role. We see more of Brakhage and his wife than in previous sections, both in everyday activities and in the grip of intense e ...

Sexual Meditation #1: Motel (1970)

This film was originally photographed in 1970 in regular 8mm. It was, a decade later, blown up to 16mm so that it could join the rest of the Sexual Meditation series. ...

Scenes from Under Childhood, Section Three (1969)

Section Ill is the most abstract section of the four, and the only one which does not contain old photographic material. The means used in previous sections to achieve abstraction and transformation of the realistic image are here employed in the extreme s ...

Scenes from Under Childhood, Section Two (1969)

In Section II we see a series of discrete sequences showing the children, now somewhat older, in different types of play. They manipulate tiny objects, doll furniture and miniature figures, dress up in costume, play outdoors, watch TV. We see them eating, ...

Nuptiae (1969)

This film celebrates weddings and being wed, and the union of opposites in everything everywhere. ...

My Mtn. Song 27 Part II: Rivers (1969)

Second Part of Song 27 (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 28 (1969)

Song 28: Scenes as texture (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 29 (1969)

SONG 29: A portrait of the artist's mother (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

American 30s Song (1969)

"Begins with a portrait of the filmmaker's father, moves through imagery of various forms of transportation (cars, boats, trains, and planes), and concludes with a 'Postlude' in which filmmaker Jerome Hill deplanes from a jet." –Gerald R. ...

Window Suite of Children's Songs (1969)

Window Suite of Children's Songs (1969)

"Films made by the five Brakhage children; Brakhage arranged them in this form but did not edit them. ...

Scenes from Under Childhood, Section One (1968)

A visualization of the inner world of foetal beginnings, the infant, the baby, the child - a shattering of the "myths of childhood" through revelation of the extremes of violent terror and overwhelming joy of that world darkened to most adults by their sen ...

The Horseman, the Woman, and the Moth (1968)

Hand painting, dye treatments and direct collage edited into 'themes and variations' that tell 'a thousand and one' stories. ...

Lovemaking (1968)

A film about the naturalness of sexuality. Its four sequences feature heterosexual and homosexual lovemaking, dogs copulating, and naked childen at play. ...

Song 26 (1968)

SONG 26: a conversation piece–a viz-a-visual, inspired by the (e)motional properties of talk: drone, bird-like twitterings, statement terror, & bombast (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage ...

My Mtn. Song 27 (1968)

Image-by-image study of the Arapaho summit, in all seasons for two years; the clouds and the climate that carve this place in the landscape (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from ...

Eye Myth (1967)

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, c ...

Song 24 (1967)

SONGS 24 & 25: A naked boy and flute song; a being about nature (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 25 (1967)

SONGS 24 & 25: A naked boy and flute song; a being about nature (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

For Life, Against the War (1967)

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of ...

23rd Psalm Branch (1967)

Made during the height of the Vietnam War, Stan Brakhage has said of this film that he was hoping to bring some clarity to the subject of war. Characteristically for Brakhage there is no direct reference to Vietnam. ...

23rd Psalm Branch: Part I (1967)

In this haunting but lyrical meditation on war, Brakhage intercuts 8-mm footage of Colorado with imagery from WWII newsreels. He responds to the violence and nightmare of war by painting directly on the filmstrip. ...

23rd Psalm Branch: Part II (1967)

The second part: Brakhage's layering of images spends less time with images of war, and begins filtering in scenes of Vienna and his home in Colorado. He sets up a comparison between "Kubelka's Vienna" and his own. ...

Song 16 (1966)

SONG 16: A flowering of sex as in the mind's eye, a joy (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 17 (1966)

SONGS 17 & 18: The movie house cathedral and a singular room (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 18 (1966)

SONGS 17 & 18: The movie house cathedral and a singular room (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 19 (1966)

SONGS 19: Women dancing and a light (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 20 (1966)

SONGS 19 & 20: Women dancing and a light (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 21 (1966)

SONGS 21 & 22: Two views of closed-eye vision (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 22 (1966)

SONGS 21 & 22: Two views of closed-eye vision (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Pasht (1966)

In honor of the cat, so named, and the goddess of all cats which she was named after. ...

Two: Creeley/McClure (1965)

Two portraits in relation to each other, the first of Robert Creeley, the second of Michael McClure. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007. ...

Fire of Waters (1965)

Black atmosphere, with depth-enhancing points of light, broken into shades of dim silhouettes by the ephemeral cloud-glow of lightning. ...

Song 11 (1965)

SONG 11: Fires, windows, an insect, a lyre of rain scratches (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 12 (1965)

SONG 12: Verticals and shadows caught in glass traps (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 13 (1965)

SONG 13: A travel song of scenes and horizontals (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 14 (1965)

SONG 14: Molds, paints and crystals (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

15 Song Traits (1965)

A series of individual portraits of friends and family, all interrelated in what might be called a branch growing directly from the trunk of SONGS 1 thru 14. On order of appearance: Robert Kelly, Jane and our dog Durin, our boys Bearthm and Rarc, daughter ...

The Art of Vision (1965)

A deconstruction of Dog Star Man that takes the four rolls and shows them first combined, then each combination of three rolls, then each combination of two rolls, then each individual roll. The plot is of a man who goes up a mountain with a dog to chop do ...

Song 10 (1965)

SONG 10: Sitting around (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 9 (1965)

SONG 9: Wedding source and substance (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Dog Star Man (1965)

Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain. ...

Dog Star Man: Part III (1964)

Sexual intimacy. Three kinds of images race past, superimposed on each other sometimes: two bodies, a man and a woman's, close up, nude - patches of skin, wisps of hair, glimpses of a face and genitalia; strips of celluloid with lines and squiggles scratch ...

Dog Star Man: Part IV (1964)

A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images include a mountain peak, farm buildings, a tree stump, a fire, a crawling baby, and the sun. The man falls and ro ...

Song 1 (1964)

SONG 1: Portrait of a lady (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 2 (1964)

SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind's movement in remembering (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 3 (1964)

SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind's movement in remembering (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 4 (1964)

SONG 4: Three girls playing with a ball. Hand painted (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 5 (1964)

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 6 (1964)

SONG 6: The painted veil via moth-death (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 7 (1964)

SONG 7: San Francisco (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Song 8 (1964)

SONG 8: Sea Creatures. The Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1963 to 1969. ...

Mothlight (1963)

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matis ...

Oh Life - a Woe Story - the A Test News (1963)

Three TV "concretes. ...

Dog Star Man: Part I (1963)

From a murky landscape, a wooded mountain emerges. We watch the sun. We see a bearded man climbing up the mountain through the snow. He carries an ax, and he's accompanied by a dog. His labors continue. There is no soundtrack. Images rush past - water, tre ...

Dog Star Man: Part II (1963)

A man, accompanied by a dog, struggles through snow on a mountain side. We see film stock blister; drawn square shapes appear. Then, we see an infant's face. The images of struggling climber, baby, blurred film stock, large snow flakes, and what may be mic ...

Blue Moses (1962)

One of the few Brakhage films featuring spoken dialogue and a central character, this sly and bitter polemic pits an actor (poet? director?) against an unseen audience. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007. ...

Prelude: Dog Star Man (1962)

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of ...

Mr. Tompkins Inside Himself (1962)

Mr. Tompkins Inside Himself (1962)

In "Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life", Mr. Tompkins learns about biology. In a wild and entertaining dream, his creator, author George Gamow, sends him through his own blood steam to investigate how his body really functions. Professor Igor Gamow and ...

Silent Sound Sense Stars Subotnick and Sender (1962)

Silent Sound Sense Stars Subotnick and Sender (1962)

This film seems to be lost, possibly left at KQED in San Francisco. Morton Subotnick has feelers out trying to find it, but no luck yet. ...

Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961)

Only at a crisis do I see both the scene as I've been trained to see it ( that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic–colors as we've been trained to call a color a color, as so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the insid ...

Sartre's Nausea (1961)

This film has never been in distribution, and it's arguably not a true Brakhage film, as it was made as a commission for a 1961 public television program on KRMA-TV in Boulder (but aired nationally), called Self Encounter: A Study in Existentialism, create ...

Films by Stan Brakhage: An Avant-Garde Home Movie (1961)

"I had a camera with which I could make multiple superimpositions spontaneously. It had been lent to me for a week. I was also given a couple of rolls of color film which had been through an intensive fire. The chance that the film would not record any ima ...

Ballad of the Colorado Ute (1961)

Featuring stylized visual storytelling, this rarely seen film by famed experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage was produced for the Colorado Department of Public Relations and is one of two films (the other being "Colorado Legend") to explore Colorado myths. ...

The Dead (1960)

"The Dead became my first work in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential. The action of making The Dead kept me alive." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership w ...

Colorado Legend (1960)

A tale of two gold miners of the old west who struck it rich. The lonely life made them heavy drinkers, and one night when the heavyset and silent Dutchman wouldn't talk to the feisty little Irishman, he was knifed to death. The Irishman was hanged and the ...

Sirius Remembered (1959)

A tribute to Stan Brakhage's pet dog Sirius, whose decompostion was recorded over 6 months after he had died. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2010. ...

Window Water Baby Moving (1959)

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, ...

Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959)

We see a film negative of a nude couple embracing in bed. Then, back in regular black and white images, we see them alone and together, clothed, at home. It's night, she sees his reflection in the window, she closes the drapes. After sex, again in a black ...

Cat's Cradle (1959)

Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work with their hands, occasionally looking up. A man enters a room, a woman smiles. He sits, another man sits and ...

Anticipation of the Night (1958)

First person view of a man, seen only in shadow, attempting to connect with the world around him. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013. ...

Loving (1957)

In Loving (1957), a couple make love in the sun and their optic system flares -- it's really the nervous system's ecstasy -- in oranges and yellows and whites. - Stan Brakhage. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation ...

Daybreak and Whiteye (1957)

These two films investigate frustrations in loving, DAYBREAK with a girl as object, WHITEYE with the camera as subject. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013. ...

Flesh of Morning (1956)

Short B/W film about the textures of the human skin and household objects, showing Brakhage in the morning as reality distorts around him. Revised in 1986. ...

Nightcats (1956)

A bold attempt, full of visual sensibility, to use living animals, innocuous of their roles, as abstract counters in a tone poem of color and chiaroscuro. ...

Zone Moment (1956)

Shots of city and country life come together to form an impressionistic whole. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012. ...

The Wonder Ring (1955)

An important early film by Stan Brakhage, which Joseph Cornell commissioned as a record of New York's Third Avenue elevated train before it was torn down. Curiously lacking in people, the film focuses on the rhythms of the ride and reflections in train win ...

Reflections on Black (1955)

Reflections on Black (1955)

A series of terrifying dramas of male-female relationships offset against the background of a New York tenement. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2012. ...

Centuries of June (1955)

Centuries of June, perhaps more than any Cornell film, is a naked attempt to capture the soul of a place and the mood of a disappearing moment. ...

In Between (1955)

Portrait of Jesse Collins: a daydream nightmare in the surrealist tradition. ...

The Extraordinary Child (1954)

The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father's cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie coul ...

The Way to Shadow Garden (1954)

The Way to Shadow Garden (1954)

This way madness - or experimental filmmaking - lies. A solitary man in coat and tie enters an apartment. It's midnight. He appears agitated and distraught. He throws a glass of water in his face and laughs. He takes off the coat and tie. His moods swing. ...

Desistfilm (1954)

Four young men and a young woman sit in boredom. She smokes while one strums a lute, one looks at a magazine, and two fiddle with string. The door opens and in comes a young man, cigarette between his lips, a swagger on his face. The young woman laughs. As ...

Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection (1953)

An anatomy of violence. Four young men and two young women are on a drive. There's a rivalry between two guys for one of the girls. On a remote road, the car stalls. The driver hitchhikes for help. Led by the intrepid girl, the others walk toward abandoned ...

The Boy and the Sea (1953)

The Boy and the Sea (1953)

Lost film directed by Stan Brakhage. Possibly never existed. "I don't think the film was ever finished or even edited. I think it was a title, possibly a sketch of an idea, and a few hundred feet of film that stayed with the Bogners. ...

Interim (1952)

A young man meets a young woman under a bridge by a railroad. They shelter from the rain and exchange a kiss. The man grows sullen and leaves. The film starts with him and ends with her. It's a straightforward anecdote told in traditional ways, the likes o ...

Movies Starring Stan Brakhage (57)

Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages (2022)

Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages (2022)

This very special film features a carefully curated selection of some of the priceless messages that have graced Anthology's voicemail system over the years. From the historically important to the utterly (and sublimely) absurd, they feature a cast of char ...

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (2013)

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s. ...

Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2011)

Experimental 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. ...

For Stan (2009)

For Stan is a tribute film shot by Marilyn Brakhage of her husband at work with his camera in the late 1980s and early 90s – illuminating their close relationship. ...

A Visit to Stan Brakhage (2006)

In late 1966 I visited Stan Brakhage in Rollinsville, Colorado. This is a portrait of Stan at home, with his family, his animals, and the surroundings, 9000 feet high. ...

Brakhage Crosses Central Park (2006)

Clip from Walden. ...

Notes on Marie Menken (2006)

Notes on Marie Menken (2006)

A look at avant-garde filmmaker Marie Menken. ...

Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability (2004)

In a voiceover Stan Brakhage articulates his resentments about the use of computers for art production and in general. This comment is contrasted by video imagery turning more and more abstract until it bursts into a sea of square pixels. The video is an i ...

A Visit to Stan Brakhage (2003)

A Visit to Stan Brakhage (2003)

A portrait of Brakhage shot in Victoria, British Columbia, just a few months before his death. Filmmaker Pip Chodorov illustrates Brakhage's reflections on his art with short passages from his hand-painted films. ...

Sonic Youth: Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui (April 12, 2003) (2003)

Filmed April 12, 2003 at a benefit concert held at and for The Anthology Film Archives, the international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of avant-garde and independent cinema. In addition to screening films for the public, AFA houses a ...

Keeping an Eye on Stan (2003)

The late, legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage is the subject of this video portrait by his friends Ken Jacobs and Nisi Jacobs.The video closely documents Brakhage's last visit to New York, and captures scenes of his family life in Boulder, Color ...

Encomium (2003)

I shot this roll of film at a party Bard College threw when it awarded Stan Brakhage an honorary degree. A few days after he died, I dug it out and watched it again. I had meant to make Brakhage a gift of the roll, but instead it became a farewell. ...

Stan Brakhage Exits the Cinema and Enters the Light of Day (2002)

A brief short of Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage going to the movies in the spring of 2002. ...

In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2002)

Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s. ...

Vakvagany (2002)

Vakvagany (2002)

Hungarian home movies are examined by the likes of James Ellroy and Stan Brakhage for evidence of family problems. ...

Garden Path (2001)

A depiction of the creative process of hand-painting film giant, Stan Brakhage. Inspired by Monet's paintings from Giverny, Brakhage's luminous abstract painting transforms the screen into an oneiric botanical landscape. Brakhage's painted loops leap out o ...

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order. ...

Looking at Forest of Bliss (2000)

Director Robert Gardner and legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage share an in-depth viewing of Gardner's ethnographic masterwork, Forest of Bliss. The film is shown in its entirety, with Gardner occasionally pausing to elucidate, and Brakhage brilliantly obser ...

Keepers of the Frame (1999)

Keepers of the Frame (1999)

An exploration of film preservation and restoration in the United States. ...

Brakhage (1998)

BRAKHAGE explores the depth and breadth of the filmmaker's genius, the exquisite splendor of his films, his magic personal charm, his aesthetic fellow travelers, and the influence his work has had on generations of other creators. While touching on signifi ...

I Met Stan Brakhage (At Moma, N.Y.C) (1998)

I Met Stan Brakhage (At Moma, N.Y.C) (1998)

Stan Brakhage shows his new films at MoMA in New York. Before that, he said hello to me, Jonas Mekas, Birgit, the Anthology team and others. Later, we return home by metro. ...

Birth of a Nation (1997)

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades. ...

Stan Brakhage on Gregory Markopoulos (1997)

Brakhage's lecture at the Whitney Museum is a thoughtful meditation on another friend and fellow filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos. ...

Stan Brakhage on Jim Davis (1997)

A very personal lecture on filmmaker and friend Jim Davis. ...

Cannibal! The Musical (1996)

Heading through Colorado Territory in search of gold and women, Alferd Packer and his group of bemused companions find themselves lost, starving and musically inspired by the obstacles they confront along the way, including a die-hard Confederate cyclops, ...

As Is Was (1995)

As Is Was (1995)

This film was shot the same weekend as Z (Zee Not Zed), when Stan Brakhage was visiting University of Rhode Island, where Marjorie Keller was teaching at the time. They get some coffee, then go for a walk on a beach in an old whaling harbor. ...

Jonas in the Desert (1994)

Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a journey through the world of the artist Jonas Mekas - one of the exponents of independent U.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive. ...

Abstract Cinema (1993)

Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their own experiments in the field of visionary filmmaking. ...

Z (Zee Not Zed) (1993)

Z (Zee Not Zed) (1993)

Stan Brakhage with a movie camera. Winter seascapes. ...

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box (1991)

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at ...

Watunna (1989)

The creation myths of the Yekuana Indians of the Orinoco region of Venezuela provide a transparent look at the poetic process by which human beings construct meaning from their experience. Narrated by Stan Brakhage. Music and sound by Bruce Odland. ...

I... Dreaming (1988)

Phrases of Stephen Foster, set to music by Joel Heartling, are set to film in this autobiographical piece: a solitary female voice, occasionally joined by a chorus, sings phrases of sorrow as we watch a solitary man in shadows in an unadorned house: he str ...

Faust's Other: An Idyll (1988)

"Faust Part 2" reveals the modern Faust in a romantic interlude, an idyll (from the Greek idein, "to see"); also, a journey of the id. A sense of story is inferred through the complex interweaving of human gesture, expression, and bodily movement within vi ...

Doodlin': Impressions Of Len Lye (1987)

This documentary, made seven years after the death of legendary filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye, tells Lye's story: from being a young boy staring at the sun, to travels around the Pacific and life in New York. It includes excerpts from many of his fi ...

Invocation: Maya Deren (1986)

Maya Deren is a legend of avant-garde cinema. This authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker, poet and anthropologist features excerpts from her pioneering Meshes of the Afternoon and her unfinished documentary on Haiti, interviews with Stan Bra ...

Reflecting Thought: Stan Brakhage (1985)

Stan Brakhage is a film maker whose work is shown mainly at film festivals. His work has been likened to poetry. Brakhage explains his techniques and his motivation. ...

Tortured Dust (1984)

The culmination of a series of autobiographical films that Brakhage made about his family (collectively known as The Book of Family), Tortured Dust was shot as the filmmaker's children from his first marriage were beginning to leave the house, and edited d ...

Stan & Jane Brakhage (1981)

A poignant portrait of Stan and Jane Brakhage visiting Juarez. ...

Grand Opera: An Historical Romance (1979)

Grand Opera: An Historical Romance (1979)

Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Sno ...

The Stars Are Beautiful (1974)

We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the ...

Reality's Invisible (1972)

Fulton made the film during his brief time at Harvard, where he had been invited to teach by Robert Gardner, his friend and collaborator (Fulton would later serve as a cinematographer on Gardner's 1981 documentary Deep Hearts, among others). Reality's Invi ...

Filmmakers (1969)

Iimura creates a short self-portrait as well as brief portraits of five of his peers: Brakhage, Vanderbeek, Smith, Mekas and Warhol. In each portrait, Iimura attempts to copy the styles and traits of each artist (Vanderbeek's constantly moving camera; Meka ...

The Art of Vision (1965)

A deconstruction of Dog Star Man that takes the four rolls and shows them first combined, then each combination of three rolls, then each combination of two rolls, then each individual roll. The plot is of a man who goes up a mountain with a dog to chop do ...

Dog Star Man (1965)

Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain. ...

Dog Star Man: Part III (1964)

Sexual intimacy. Three kinds of images race past, superimposed on each other sometimes: two bodies, a man and a woman's, close up, nude - patches of skin, wisps of hair, glimpses of a face and genitalia; strips of celluloid with lines and squiggles scratch ...

Dog Star Man: Part IV (1964)

A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images include a mountain peak, farm buildings, a tree stump, a fire, a crawling baby, and the sun. The man falls and ro ...

Song 1 (1964)

SONG 1: Portrait of a lady (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969). ...

Dog Star Man: Part I (1963)

From a murky landscape, a wooded mountain emerges. We watch the sun. We see a bearded man climbing up the mountain through the snow. He carries an ax, and he's accompanied by a dog. His labors continue. There is no soundtrack. Images rush past - water, tre ...

Dog Star Man: Part II (1963)

A man, accompanied by a dog, struggles through snow on a mountain side. We see film stock blister; drawn square shapes appear. Then, we see an infant's face. The images of struggling climber, baby, blurred film stock, large snow flakes, and what may be mic ...

Prelude: Dog Star Man (1962)

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of ...

Window Water Baby Moving (1959)

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, ...

Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959)

We see a film negative of a nude couple embracing in bed. Then, back in regular black and white images, we see them alone and together, clothed, at home. It's night, she sees his reflection in the window, she closes the drapes. After sex, again in a black ...

Cat's Cradle (1959)

Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work with their hands, occasionally looking up. A man enters a room, a woman smiles. He sits, another man sits and ...

Flesh of Morning (1956)

Short B/W film about the textures of the human skin and household objects, showing Brakhage in the morning as reality distorts around him. Revised in 1986. ...

Trumpit (1956)

Featuring a card game played on the body of a naked woman, Lawrence Jordan portrays male sexual frustration while slyly satirizing Hollywood reaction shots. ...

The One Romantic Venture of Edward (1956)

The young man, played by Stan Brakhage, gets himself into a seriously comic mix-up by indulging in semi-sexual fantasies, and allowing the fantasies to take over. This is the best of my very early films and includes my first footage. ...

The Extraordinary Child (1954)

The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father's cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie coul ...

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