Movies: Stan Brakhage

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....

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 int...

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 th...

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 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 agai...

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....

Begins with blue negative face of child, ends with single centered eye....

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...

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....

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 the...

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 ton...

"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 a...

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

This is a hand-painted, step-printed (with a variety of effects) film which begins with rock-like earth-toned shapes in darkness, followed by increasingly lighter pastel-colored mini-boulder forms to the right and left of the frame mimicking a whitis...

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 fai...

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...

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. Stan Brakhage: A Guide to References and Resources)...

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 ...

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 th...

A film photographed in Amsterdam but dedicated to capturing a quality of mind engendered there - not, certainly, alienation (as often in travel) but rather some heightened sense of being other....