Movies: Stan Brakhage

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 li...

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 se...

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 mo...

An alternate title for Centuries of June...

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....

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 ...

"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 ironie...

Begins with raccoon in a rose light, ends with fading face of child....

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

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

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

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....

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 a...

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

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-pla...

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 pas...

Wedding gift from Maya Deren to Geoffrey Holder; Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan made film of wedding at Maya Deren’s invitation, told to be “as free as possible”...

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

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....

"My moving-visual response to William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven & Hell," this hand-painted film seems the most rhythmically exact of all my work: it was inspired by memories of an old man coughing in the night of a thing-walled ancient hotel......