Stan Brakhage Movies

SELF SONG documents a body besieged by cancer. The amber glow of flesh suggests both victory and submission to death. Blackness surrounds the image...

The last of Brakhage's longer works. Part of the "Vancouver Island" films. "Purple flashes are followed by a curtain of purple and blues, first...

A young man meets a young woman under a bridge by a railroad. They shelter from the rain and exchange a kiss. The man grows sullen and leaves. The...

This hand-painted step-printed film begins in a field of white light slightly bespeckled with ephemeral glazes of flecks of silver which gradually...

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.

This is a hand-painted work whose shapes are scratched on black leader filled with varieties of color: the resultant shapes tend to suggest...

Prelude 10 is a double-printed film with an extreme mixture of darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and very white bursts of light and...

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid...

This is a hand-painted step-printed film which begins with slow dissolves of what appear to be decaying leaves, crumpled browns and golds and oranges...

Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work...

This film is composed of three sections created to accompany a piece of music (by Barbara Feldman) on a Homeric poem.

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

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...

In “Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life”, Mr. Tompkins learns about biology. In a wild and entertaining dream, his creator, author...

This film is an elaborately hand-painted step-printed work composed primarily of luminescent greens and blues in constantly shifting symmetrical...

A woman and two men talking, seen one by one, in a montage of three movements that make up a fast-slow-fast cycle. The second movement is composed of...

A year and a half ago the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted I must see the Chartres Cathedral. I, who had studied...

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

Wedding gift from Maya Deren to Geoffrey Holder; Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan made film of wedding at Maya Deren’s invitation, told to be...

"The quote is Joseph Conrad answering a critic who found his books too long. Conrad replied that he could write a novel on the inside of a match-book...