Stan Brakhage

One of the key works of the American avant-garde of the 1960s, DOG STAR MAN is no less than an abstract vision of the creation of the universe, an epic work consisting of a prelude and four parts (Rotten Tomatoes)

Autopsy footage.

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 with their hands, occasionally looking up. A man enters a room, a woman smiles. He sits, another man sits and smokes. The cat stretches. There are close-ups of each. The light is dim; a filter accentuates red. A bare foot stands on a satin sheet. A woman disrobes. She pets the cat.

Only about a 2 minute short, it really has no plot or characters or anything. Just random colors. (Letterboxd)

Stan Brakhage films the birth of his first child, Myrrena. (imdb)

A "found foliage" film composed of insects, leaves, and other detritus sandwiched between two strips of perforated tape. (imdb)

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 change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? (IMDb)

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 black and white negative, they sit, smoke, have coffee. They kiss, she smiles. They light candles.

A lateral descent through the midnight blues and blacks of ice and the refracted colors from absorbed oils. (imdb)

A visual representation, in four parts, of one man's internalization of "The Divine Comedy." Hell is a series of multicolored brush strokes against a white background; the speed of the changing images varies. "Hell Spit Flexion," or springing out of Hell, is on smaller film stock, taking the center of the frame. Montages of color move rapidly with a star and the edge of a lighted moon briefly visible. Purgation is back to full frame; blurs of color occasionally slow down then freeze...

The film starts with thick, tactile clumps of paint, some of the most pronounced textural effects I've seen in my admittedly limited exposure to Brakhage's painting. The paint seems to be elevated off the film cells, deeply layered and creating a shaky, start/stop frame-by-frame flow. (seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com)

Four young men and a young woman sit in boredom. She smokes while one strums a lute, one looks at a magazine, and two fiddle with string. The door opens and in comes a young man, cigarette between his lips, a swagger on his face. The young woman laughs. As the four young men continue disconnected activities, the other two become a couple. When the four realize something has changed, first they stare at the couple who have kissed and now are dancing slowly...

A nostalgic envisionment of city living - the potential shards of memory seen as if always on the verge of cutting the mind to pieces ...: "Nostalgia is the most dangerous thought process" (poet Charles Olson, mid-60s). (Stan Brakhage)

Pretty fusion of accelerated colours by Stan Brakhage

Commingled Containers is often interpreted in light of Brakhage's health problems at the time, and is considered to represent the director's own spiritual quest.[3] Scott MacDonald describes the film as "a talisman that expresses Brakhage's determination to continue his spiritual quest and to offer viewers something of Light, despite his fear of mortality, for as long as it was given to him to remain in the flow of life." (Wikipedia)

We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the family, while the narrator explains the heavens. We see a bee up close. The narrator suggests metaphors for heavenly bodies. Scenes fade into a black screen or dim purple; close-ups of family life may be blurry. The words about the heavens, su

A stand of birches. Sunlight brightens and dims, revealing more or less of the woods. A little grass is on the forest floor. Is there a shape in the shadows? Something green is out of focus. The light flashes, and the screen goes dark from time to time. We look up close at the bark of trees. Is the god of the forest to be seen?

It begins like many of his hand painted films do but the usual dense array of colors and shapes dulls and not as mobile. When it starts to take shape a nice effect takes place with the shapes coming apart as ghosted duplicates slowly rise toward the top of the frame. The film is about to have an out-of-body experience, and detaches from itself nicely. (cantstopthemovies.com)

Phrases of Stephen Foster, set to music by Joel Heartling, are set to film in this autobiographical piece: a solitary female voice, occasionally joined by a chorus, sings phrases of sorrow as we watch a solitary man in shadows in an unadorned house: he stretches out, he picks his feet, he walks across a room, he rocks in a chair. Occasionally he watches two young children at play; the film sometimes speeds up. Handwritten words, like "dark void" and "waiting longing," cross the screen.

Stan Brakhage's artistic view of the cosmos.

Hand painted short film that expresses rage through explosions of color.

Runs exactly three minutes and features all sorts of strange colors, shapes and objects.

Hand painted film which is mostly black with flashes of color.

Refracted images, not unlike those in a funhouse mirror, display two children playing in a backyard, a boy and a girl. There's a dog, a swing, a picket fence, a Big Wheels trike. The grass is green and lush. A soundtrack mixes a chorus, swelling strings, and a child vocalizing. The effect is to idealize the images.

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. (letterboxd)

In The Garden of Earthly Delights, Brakhage took pieces of plants he encountered in his everyday life, arranged the assortments of leaves, seeds, stamens, roots and flowers into patterns between two pieces of 35mm film, and optically printed the results... (sensesofcinema.com)

An abstract depiction of the confusion of childhood.

This film is a 'deconstruction' of 'Dog Star Man'. It takes the four 'rolls' of super-fast edited, often poetic, imagery of 'Dog Star Man' and shows them first combined, then each combination of three rolls(=4) then each combination of two rolls (=6) then each individual roll (=4). The 'plot' is of a man who goes up a mountain with a dog to chop down a tree, but he has some unspecified transcendental experience while he is there.

Time-lapse photography of books, paintings, reflections, and light falling on textures, shot entirely through a glass ashtray. (imdb)

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, reflection, etc. (coolidge.org)

I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUS EX in West Pennsylvania Hospital of Pittsburgh; but I was especially inspired by the memory of one incident in an Emergency Room of SF's Mission District: while waiting for medical help, I had held myself together by reading an April-May 1965 issue of "Poetry Magazine"; and the following lines from Charles Olson's "Cole's Island" had especially centered the experience, "touchstone" of DEUS EX.... (Stan Brakhage)

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 gave me the moon and seven stars." (Stan Brakhage)

This unique work within Brakhage's oeuvre features the artist in confrontation with the camera eye as he presents a philosophical investigation of the nature of the medium. (harvard.edu)

Brakhage documents the gradual dissolution of the corpse of the family dog. (YouTube)

This film is composed of three sections created to accompany a piece of music (by Barbara Feldman) on a Homeric poem: (1) "Diana holds back the night..." is represented by dark shapes suppressing (almost angularly interfering with) orange-golden effusions of paint and the reflective paint-shapes of early morning greens (as if silhouettes or arm and bodily profile were shading the light), (2) Homer's "...rolling sea..." represented by hand-painted step-printed dissolves of blues in wave shapes... (Stan Brakhage)

This is a film composed of two elements: (1) simple hand-painted frames and brief strips of hand-painting, and (2) strips of blank colors, which appear as overall hues or color tones filtering light itself rather than any pictured scenes. These two elements are interposed in editing so as to suggest the seasonal changes of tree-leaf (from greens to golds, reds and browns) and the sky (from varieties of warm-to-cold blues).

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 visual (i.e. un-musical) theme. This film is composed of 35mm hand-painted images reduced to 16mm film, single-frames, shots of 2, 3, 4 frames and, occasionally, slightly longer shots, all interspersed with a variety of calculated lengths of black leader which cause a flickering of abstract patterns in rhythmed darkness. (Stan Brakhage)

A hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to create varieties of tempo in mimic of sparking and molten rock. The recurrent centrality of certain painted forms, and the exploding magma-like flickering repetitions of all that surrounds the forms, suggests a harrowing process. (Stan Brakhage)

This is a hand-painted film photographically step-printed so that the thicket-like lines of paint are "played-off" against some centered pale-hued areas of paint in such a way as to suggest a clearing in a forest of branches (which is, in the repetitive form of the whole film only fleetingly seen) - a trysting place which flits through the mind like a ghost. (Stan Brakhage)

A year and a half ago the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted that I must see Chartres Cathedral. I, who had studied picture books of its great stained-glass windows, sculpture and architecture for years, having also read Henry Adams' great book three times, willingly complied and had an experience of several hours (in the discreet company of French filmmaker Jean-Michel Bouhours) which surely transformed my aesthetics more than any other single experience... (Stan Brakhage)

A series of five hand-painted step-printed films, each of which is a textured, thus tangible, "nothing". A series of "nots", then, in pun, or knots of otherwise invisible energies. (1) The first begins with a semblence of fog clouds rising vertically, an upward lifting waterfall likeness which screens an ephemere of painted shapes that come, at end, to a rhythmic and formal hardness. (2) A progression of blue surreal shapes vanishing in forward movements. (3) A gathering of crystalline forms... (Stan Brakhage)

Black atmosphere, with depth-enhancing points of light, broken into shades of dim silhouettes by the ephemeral cloud-glow of lightning. (imdb)

An important early film by Stan Brakhage, which Cornell commissioned as a record of New York's Third Avenue before it was torn down. Curiously lacking in people, the film focuses on the rhythms of the ride and reflections in train windows, finding a real-world version of the superimpositions Brakhage would later create in the lab. (chicagoreader.com)

Birth footage of one of Brakhage's children.

Imagines the dream-vision of a blind man as he walks through a city, climbs the stairs of his apartment building and arrives home. Brakhage signals the blindness of his protagonist by physically scratching out his eyes, and splices in bits of film negative to convey the sense of experience the world as a blind man might, not as something seen, but something pictured. (Brian Frye)

Europe, weighted down so much with that past, was THE DEAD. I was always Tourist there; I couldn't live in it. The graveyard could stand for all my view of Europe, for all the concerns with past art, for involvement with symbol. THE DEAD became my first work, in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential. The action of making THE DEAD kept me alive. (Stan Brakhage)

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. (art.meetup.com)

Part II of Brakhage's "meditation on war" created in 1978, 41 minutes. (art.meetup.com)

The daylight shadow of a man in movement evokes lights in the night. A rose bowl, held in hand, reflects both sun and moon-like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water, with promissory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all night light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return.... (Stan Brakhage)

Murder Psalm is made from found footage which is drawn from a variety of sources, from potentialities of child abuse to the simplest of cruelties of children, that is, of one human to another that can destroy life. In this case part of the film came from footage on epilepsy. I have wrenched it into something much larger in my urgency and necessity. At any rate that film was made in three days. And I was damn glad to get rid of it because it is not a film I would ever have wanted to have made.... (Stan Brakhage)

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 film starts with him and ends with her. It's a straightforward anecdote told in traditional ways, the likes of which he'd forsake forever; that is, it uses actors, a soundtrack with music and post-dubbed sound effects, a photographer who frames everything professionally and a coherent edited narrative. (Michael Barrett)

about six chums from the University of Pueblo who explore a ruined building in the middle of nowhere. It's a kind of horror movie about its own sense of creeping dread, as tensions build to tragedy. You could argue that the house reflects the cracks in their personalities or their relationships, but this film seems to have been made because Brakhage had actors and a location, and that he would have been just as happy dispensing with the actors. (Michael Barrett)

The hand-held camera wanders all over a crowded room whose objects are themselves in motion. A young man enters and strikes various campy poses of unease before removing his shirt in a kind of exhiliration and, in another mood swing (mirrored by the swinging camera and abrupt edits), performs a "mythological" act directly related to seeing... (Michael Barrett)

The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father's cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie could be taken as another example of the Romantic notion of the artist as a monstrous child or misfit, or a parody of the same rather than the personal confessional statement seen so often in these film movements. (Michael Barrett)

What I can say is, appears him working on his films contrasting with images of his hand painted cinema always colorful and full of sensual colors rhythms, this was made in collaboration with Mary Beth Reed. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hardly at a loss for new ways to use film, Brakhage's interest in light and movement is purest in his surprisingly beautiful abstractions created by chipping emulsion off the film base. Most of his films are made without sound because Brakhage feels that the use of sound "cuts back sight." This use of silence is very effective especially in the examples from the Song series where the visual rhythms need no accompaniment. (Karagarga)

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Hand-painted film.

Experimental film.

The Riddle of Lumen, similarly, is less an inventory of emotions than an inventory of different kinds of light -- though individual images can also have emotional implications, of course. But Brakhage edits the film to undercut, even deny, the kinds of obvious unities achieved by cutting on common shapes or similar movements that organized many of his earlier films. The effect of this editing is to constitute each individual image, each variety of light, as a kind of irreducible mystery. (Fred Camper)

Hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film of images of mansions, castles, gardens and landscapes, then interior rooms and corridors, in different colour themes. (bfi.org.uk)

One of Brakhage's extremely beautiful hand-painted films, his attempts to express directly on the film strip his fascination with "hypnagogic," or "closed-eye" vision. (differentdirections.ie)

The hand-painting of this film is interrupted by, and interspersed with, a geometrically structured Mask of Death (one of those frightening human idea-shapes of dying) immediately caught-up in threads of streaming, polarized crystals of Light (elaborately step-printed, with simultaneous frame-to-frame dissolves and printer "pull-backs" creating an effect as if the room in which the film is being viewed was inhaling viscous strands of Life's chemical material). (canyoncinema.com)

Part of the "Pittsburgh Trilogy"

four-minute pyschosexual rumination film on the often blurry nature of gender roles in the copulatory ritual. Shot on 16 mm film, the picture introduces the viewer to two distinct characters, a male and female, although many have postulated that the female is simply an illusionary impression of the male's apparent sexual frustration. (Wikipedia)

This film takes all the masturbatory themes of previous "Sexual Meditations" back to the source in pre-adolescent dreams. OPEN FIELD is in the mind, of course, and exists as a weave of trees, grasses, waters and bodies poised and fleeting at childhood's end. The scene is lit as by sun and moon alike and haunted by the pursuant adult. (canyoncinema.com)

One of Brakhage's most stunning landscape films, Creation is set in a far north wilderness during the transition between the seasons and the surge of life being renewed. (harvard.edu)

This film describes a psychological state 'kin to "moon-struck," its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of "falling away" from conscious thought. The film can only be said to "describe" or be emblematic of this state because it's impossible symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness (musicafilm.it)

Abstract animated art mixed with high pitched sounds.

Centuries of June, perhaps more than any Cornell film, is a naked attempt to capture the soul of a place and the mood of a disappearing moment. (Film Love)

Painted experimental film.

Two portraits in relation to each other, the first of Robert Creeley, the second of Michael McClure. (Criterion)

Experimental film

experimental film

Desert is a phenomenally sensual, evocative film from Stan Brakhage. It is an examination of literal and metaphysical deserts, extracting the essence of the desert and exploring both the physical place and its abstract equivalent -- red-hot sun, hazy heat-blurring, hallucinatory mirages, wavery color fields that suggest the horizon line dividing sand from sky. (seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com)

With The Process Brakhage again addresses the interaction of internal and external sources of imagery, but in this case, as the sole subject of the film. Here, slightly displaced positive and negative versions of the same image create a feeling of insubstantiality. And movements, such as a door being opened or closed, seem to slide across the plane of the screen, defying our normal sense of perspective and evoking, instead, brushes of light across a visual field of mind.

Continuing the variable themes of thought process, Brakhage had paired his 1978 Burial Path with another short film of that year, Thot Fal'n, noting that, like the earlier piece, Burial Path "graphs the process of forgetfulness." But Burial Path is also about death, and was sometimes referred to (by Brakhage) as the third part of a trilogy, with Sirius Remembered (1959) and The Dead (1960).

In the warm, autumnal Duplicity III the viewer is presented with multiple superimpositions of children engaged in dramatic play, a strategy whereby the filmmaker reveals the roots of social roles and evasions, while yet presenting "drama as an ultimate play for truth."

Here we see Brakhage turn his camera on four of the animals in his immediate surroundings. Flora and fauna, flower petals and moth wings to snakes, donkeys, and goats, his many mysterious cats, as well as animals occasionally encountered in the wild, would weave their way through many films, occasionally becoming the focused study of one or another work.

In these later photographic abstractions, Brakhage took his next leap into the orchestration of pure light and refracted colors, drawing on the perceived inner movements of the mind, the qualities of music, and the inherent nature of film to present us with a vision of what he believed to be the inner "grammar" that formed the structural basis of all thought.

For many years, Brakhage was based in the mountains of Colorado, and later in the town of Boulder. At the same time, when he traveled to new geographies, the immediacy of his engagement with the particularities of light and rhythms of those other places or their specific cultural manifestations would produce some of his most deeply felt works. (Criterion)

For many years, Brakhage was based in the mountains of Colorado, and later in the town of Boulder. At the same time, when he traveled to new geographies, the immediacy of his engagement with the particularities of light and rhythms of those other places or their specific cultural manifestations would produce some of his most deeply felt works. (Criterion)

For many years, Brakhage was based in the mountains of Colorado, and later in the town of Boulder. At the same time, when he traveled to new geographies, the immediacy of his engagement with the particularities of light and rhythms of those other places or their specific cultural manifestations would produce some of his most deeply felt works. (Criterion)

For many years, Brakhage was based in the mountains of Colorado, and later in the town of Boulder. At the same time, when he traveled to new geographies, the immediacy of his engagement with the particularities of light and rhythms of those other places or their specific cultural manifestations would produce some of his most deeply felt works. (Criterion)

Brakhage described Unconscious London Strata as a "reconstruction of the mind's eye at the borders of the unconscious," writing that "some visual song of all of England's history began to move through this material," creating, then, a musical metaphor of mind, as memory manifested on film as "rounds within rounds." (Criterion)

Can be seen, once again, as equivalents of different aspects of thought process--whether a study in alienation, a memory piece recalled as rhythms of vision, or a weave in the mind of what is peripherally seen and absorbed of daily life in a seeming emotional and optical response to the ephemeral nature of earthly existence. (Criterion)

The Mammals of Victoria (1994), the second of the Vancouver Island films, is an elemental study in the energies of adolescence--another example of that particular strand in Brakhage's work (as is Boulder Blues and Pearls And . . .) in which he would combine photographic and painted imagery, assuredly weaving together the shimmering fragility of worldly phenomena and visual experience with both concrete and metaphorical representations of an interior life.

Beautiful short film of rich painting and overlaid scratched words (Criterion)

Part of Brakhage's hand-painted Trilogy

In late 1996 and 1997, Brakhage's work evidenced a partial return to photographic aesthetics, with Commingled Containers (volume one) and The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm, as well as the ecstatic paean to earthly existence, with intimations, perhaps, of immortality, that is Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (Criterion)

In late 1996 and 1997, Brakhage's work evidenced a partial return to photographic aesthetics, with Commingled Containers (volume one) and The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm, as well as the ecstatic paean to earthly existence, with intimations, perhaps, of immortality, that is Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind

In 1998, Brakhage completed the five reels of Ellipses, culminating in the only sound piece of that series. ". . ." Reel Five is one of four sound films included in this volume, and it is the third film that Brakhage made with the music of his longtime friend composer James Tenney (Criterion)

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture. (Criterion)

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture. (Criterion)

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture. (Criterion)

Brakhage's last film, the hand-scratched Chinese Series (2003)--finished just weeks before his death--flickers across the screen as suggestions of Chinese ideograms, while at the same time, as filmmaker Courtney Hoskins would have it, evoking a sense of "running through a humid bamboo forest . . . [in which] green and yellow stalks create these glowing shadows as they cut across the sunlight." (Criterion)

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time. (imdb)

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

Across his life, Brakhage was inspired not only to contemplate and make manifest his own thought process and visual experience but to consider the shared, cultural aspects of those forms, and to explore the variations of shapes, colors, forms, and movements that might typify the underlying thought process of a given culture.

[This film] begins with the "fire" of reflective light on water and on the barest inferences of a ship... [throughout it tells its tale] through visible textures and forms in gradual evolution...then, by the increasingly distant boat images, birds, animals, fleeting silhouettes of people and their artifacts, flotsam and jetsam of the sea-dead, as well as...flowers in bloom, swallowed by darkness midst the crumbling of the sand castles. (Fred Camper.com)

A man, accompanied by a dog, struggles through snow on a mountain side. We see film stock blister; drawn square shapes appear. Then, we see an infant's face. The images of struggling climber, baby, blurred film stock, large snow flakes, and what may be microscopic details of matter are superimposed on each other, one dominating the frame briefly to be replaced by another. As the man falls in the snow and tries to regain his feet, the baby continues to appear, first with eyes closed. (imdb)

Sexual intimacy. Three kinds of images race past, superimposed on each other sometimes: two bodies, a man and a woman's, close up, nude - patches of skin, wisps of hair, glimpses of a face and genitalia; strips of celluloid with lines and squiggles scratched on them; and, close-up shots of what appear to be the insides of living bodies - a heart beating, muscle and sinew and tissue wet with fluids. The exterior and interior of desire. (imdb)

A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images include a mountain peak, farm buildings, a tree stump, a fire, a crawling baby, and the sun. The man falls and rolls. Then, later, he swings his ax. (imdb)

Visual essay from Stan Brakhage on the subject of sex.

Experimental stuff

Experimental stuff

Experimental

Fifty seconds is all Stan Brakhage needs to challenge the power of the images we see. Without sound and handpainted. A dance of colors, forms and flaws at a speed that seems to mock the lyrical effect of the result. (rateyourmusic)

An experimental film from Stan Brakhage in which a man and his dog ascend a wooded mountain.

Brakhage's hand carvings directly into the film emulsions are illuminated and textured by Solomon's lighting and optical printing. The forms are then shaped and edited by Solomon into a Dance of Seasons, a Hymn to the Sun, from Summer to Spring, inspired by the woodcuts of Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige and Anton Webern's orchestral coloration of Ricecar from The Musical Offering.

Experimental duo.

The first film in the loose “Vancouver Island” quartet, Brakhage films locations around the British Columbia locale where his second wife, Marilyn, grew up. He films land, sea, and sky and intercuts frequently between them. Shots are often out-of-focus, to accentuate color and light; they are hand-held, upside down, and fleeting.

Working completely outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of "birth, sex, death, and the search for God," he has turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. criterion.com