Movies: Stan Brakhage

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of empti...

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of empti...

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

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 is a hand-painted film whose emotionally referential shapes and colors are interwoven with words (in English) from the first Hymn to the Night by the late 18th century mystic poet Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, whose pen name was Novalis. Th...

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....

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of empti...

"Twigs" of color in space, and pure white "ghosts" of them in the background interspersed with dark amalgams of these and conglomerate forms. The resolve of these themes is a combination of "amalgams" and "ghosts" at one in interplay, and then dark s...

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of empti...

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of empti...

This hand-painted work presents the semblance of a dark brown wall, ripped open and pocked with yellowed visions of rooms and other interiors, gradually (and always occasionally) intersperced with multiply colored holes, revealing exteriors beyond th...

"With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of empti...

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

Flares of color break into streams of light, leaves, wood grain and prism-etched vegetation. A moon lifts out of this dark weave to be replaced by autumn leaves against a grainy sky, a fiery sky. A gray cat licks itself. A black cat sits quickly down...

Singly-printed multi-colored watery "blobs" and "feathery" streaks of painted color, dominated by yellows and reds interweaving in complexity until there's an evolution of hard-edge autumn leaf patterns which dissipate into patterns similar to the be...

This is the realization of a 30 year old dream, a wish of the young filmmaker to film a modern Faust which finally came to a fulfillment as unpredictable and as absolute as, say, three decades of living experience. Like earlier artists who have treat...

An anatomy of violence. Four young men and two young women are on a drive. There's a rivalry between two guys for one of the girls. On a remote road, the car stalls. The driver hitchhikes for help. Led by the intrepid girl, the others walk toward aba...

This film celebrates weddings and being wed, and the union of opposites in everything everywhere....

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)....

Section Ill is the most abstract section of the four, and the only one which does not contain old photographic material. The means used in previous sections to achieve abstraction and transformation of the realistic image are here employed in the ext...