Stan Brakhage Movies

SONG 12: Verticals and shadows caught in glass traps (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan...

“The Riddle of Lumen” presents an evenly paced sequence of images, which seem to follow an elusive logic. As in “Zorns Lemma”...

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...

Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.

By painting and scratching directly on celluloid strips and then duplicating each image for two or more frames, Brakhage produced a flickering cycle...

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...

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

"nodus knot, node - more at NET) ... 4a: a point at which subsidiary parts originate or center ... 5: a point, line, or surface of a vibrating body...

This is one of the most elaborately edited of all the hand-painted films of late - a Haydenesque complexity of thematic variations on a totally...

From a murky landscape, a wooded mountain emerges. We watch the sun. We see a bearded man climbing up the mountain through the snow. He carries an...

"In his description for A CHILD'S GARDEN, Brakhage quotes from poets Ronald Johnson and Charles Olson (and cites Johnson's poem "Beam 29" as...

What can one say? – that won’t limit by language the complexity of moving visual thinking?… the skein of pattern that seeks to...

Someone said to me, of this film, that it was really about light; but Jane (who takes it as a portrait – i. e., sees herself in it) said: You...

This is one of those "little films" which is pure "cine poem" in the sense that it is picture, but also given over to what we call "abstract" - which...

Two short films, the first NOT about purity itself, whatever that might be, but rather an equivalent of the process of searching for purity in the...

“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...

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

As a poem might be said to contain the night through a weave of words, so have I in this film attempted such a container with warp and woof of...

Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.

The final Duplicity film does seem at resolve with the term. All previous visual manifestations have been extended to their limits, through four-roll...