Movies: Stan Brakhage

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...

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....

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....

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 o...

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

The second, of these companion films (interspersed by a "Technicolor+ countdown") introduces The Movies (Narrative Dramatic Scenes briefly flickering midst hypnogogic-painting) in addition to the closed-eye vision and language combination of Night Mu...

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 te...

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

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

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

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

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 narra...

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. The...

Ascension begins by superimposing paintings that look like clouds over extremely close views of mottled paint, peculiarly intimate in their three-dimensionality. Juxtaposing images of transcendence with representations of what he liked to call the "m...

Three TV "concretes."...

“Films made by the five Brakhage children; Brakhage arranged them in this form but did not edit them.” –Robert Haller...

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 ordi...

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

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. – Parker Tyler...