Movies: Stan Brakhage

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 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 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)....

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....

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....

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

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....

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 wi...

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 thoughtfu...

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 shoo...

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 develo...

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

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....

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....

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....

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....

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, ...

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, reflect...

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 cy...

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 s...