Stan Brakhage Movies

SONGS 17 & 18: The movie house cathedral and a singular room (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker...

Begins with back of airplane seat, ends with horizontal streaks of bold light.

Prelude 19 begins with hand-painted swatches of variable colors encompassed eventually by vertical strokes of reds and blues, followed by sudden...

Elaborate petal-like and multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures...

Jane and the kids go to town. Directly in the tradition of SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD, this film may indeed constitute a 3rd chapter to 'The Book of...

BLUE WHITE, "an intonation of child birth"; BLOOD'S TONE, "a golden nursing film"; VEIN, "a film of baby Buddha masturbation."

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

Visiting the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado, abandoned about 1275, Brakhage thought, "There is terror here." And so he returns again and...

Brakhage's frame-by-frame hand carvings and etchings directly into the film emulsion, sometimes photographically combined with paint, are illuminated...

Begins with rocks, tree trucks, plants in glow of light, ends with green and gold forest scene.

"This is a portrait of that man I choose to call the greatest I've known: Clancy, whom the fates surnamed Sheey, personifies for me that which is...

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...

Just as the word Idyll of Faust's Part 2 is rooted in the Greek idein/to see, so is "candida" in candidatus, as used in the white robed army of...

“I tried to imagine what the last hymn to Novalis’s night had been if it was beyond language. (…) is the most elaborate hand...

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...

"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...

“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...

Ken, Flo and Nisi Jacobs in the Syracuse Airport: this is what you might call baby-sitting in the swamp.

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 hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which...