Stan Brakhage Movies

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

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

SONG 8: Sea Creatures. The Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1963 to...

In Loving (1957), a couple make love in the sun and their optic system flares -- it's really the nervous system's ecstasy -- in oranges and yellows...

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,...

Resurrectus Est is a hand painted film which suggests, from the first, a spread of fragments of plants and flowers, individual petals and bits of...

It was while studying this film that I decided to group these ‘romans’ under the title Roman Numeral Series and to give up the term...

The hand-painting of this film is interrupted by, and interspersed with, a geometrically structured Mask of Death (one of those frightening human...

Time-lapse photography of books, paintings, reflections, and light falling on textures, shot entirely through a glass ashtray. "'All that is is...

"The third and shortest section reintroduces camera-derived imagery and, minimal as it may be (sunlight shimmering on water, seagull wheeling in the...

The following films were all made in 1976. I do not wish to describe them. (S.B.) "Has aspects of the diary film...The Dream is one of the most...

This film takes its cue from that ultimate situation of Sex/Med/masturbation - the loft-and-lonely hotel room. It is thus easily twice the length and...

To the child mind, the transformative sacrificial power of "O, Lamb of God" is a daily manifestation - not as an adult shift-of-interest, but rather...

This film by Stan Brakhage investigates the process of memory and thought by melting a series of images and a field of color. The positive-negative...

Reel #5 of (...) is composed of scratch-imagery edited to music by James Tenney. The music starts accompanied only by black leader: then there is a...

This film has never been in distribution, and it’s arguably not a true Brakhage film, as it was made as a commission for a 1961 public...

A meat enigma spoken in eternal language of director, con man, and magician. It pits an actor against an unseen audience.

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...

...again, is "plein-aire abstraction" as defined above (painted in New York City) – with, for example, even a correctly toned green impression...

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