Movies: Stan Brakhage

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 primar...

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: 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)....

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

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 w...

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...

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

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...

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....

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....

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 St...

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 i...

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 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)....

"'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....

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 ...

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...

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....

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....

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....