Stan Brakhage’s final film, made shortly before his death by wetting a filmstrip with saliva and using his fingernail to scratch marks into the emulsion.
Persian Series #6 begins with what appears to be dried red and yellow rose petals, suddenly shot-thru with blue which causes a shift to violets and greens. This mash of…
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…
This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes interspersed by darkness, then becomes lit lightning-like by sharp multiply-colored…
This hand-painted step-printed film begins with streaks of glare light and vibrantly colored forms apparently in the sky forinasmuch as there appears, frame center, the tapered shape of a tower,…
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…
Comingled Containers is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage. “This ‘return to photography’ (after several years of only painting film) was made on the eve of cancer surgery –…
Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular “watermarks” of blotched paint giving-way to multi-colored brush strokes and finally fulsomely darkened and thickened brush-strokes which…
Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst “clouds” of color, finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them.
Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their “weave” with each other which is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears…
This film is entirely hand-painted and is composed of such an evolution of variably colored shapes that their inter-action with each other should constitute a purely visual “self-evident” (as prompted…
“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…
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…
A hand-painted and photographically step-printed film, which exhibits variably shaped small areas of color (in a dark field) that explode into full frames of textured color interwoven with white scratch…
This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes partial use of painted frames in repetition (for “close-up”…
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…
Four superimposed rolls of hand-painted and bi-packed television negative imagery are edited so as to approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions of luminescent light.
This hand-painted work is easily the most minutely detailed ever given to me to do, for it traces (as best I’m able) the hypnagogic after-effect of psychological cathexis as designed…
This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein’s “Stanzas In Meditation”, in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes and human symbolism “indicative of that…
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…
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…
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…
A collage of two-dimensional images of vegetation, each appearing only for a moment, sometimes as a single image, more often with other bits of stem, leaf, bud, or petal. Often…
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 against all oddities…
The “star”, as it is singular, is the sun; and it is metaphored, at the beginning of this film, by the projector anyone uses to show forth. Then the imaginary…
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…
