Stan Brakhage Movies

“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...

This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes interspersed...

Ascension begins by superimposing paintings that look like clouds over extremely close views of mottled paint, peculiarly intimate in their...

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...

SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind’s movement in remembering (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker...

A series of terrifying dramas of male-female relationships offset against the background of a New York tenement. Preserved by the Academy Film...

"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...

Another of Brakhage’s works of “moving visual thinking,” Rage Net reminds one of the vibrant pioneering experiments of European...

Red and ephemeral blue and purple plant shapes half-curled against a tan ground, which begins to flash white cracks in dried mud patterns. A flush of...

Persian Series #16 is an even more exaggerated contrast of color and black-and-white patterning.

SONG 11: Fires, windows, an insect, a lyre of rain scratches (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker...

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...

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

A bold attempt, full of visual sensibility, to use living animals, innocuous of their roles, as abstract counters in a tone poem of color and...

Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed weave of tones moving from oranges & yellows to blue-greens, then retreating (dissolves of zooming away) to both...

This film begins with points of light defining a dark space out of which a female dancer (Vivienne Palmer) emerges dressed in a semi-transparent...

A poignant portrait of Stan and Jane Brakhage visiting Juarez.

This, then, finishes eleven years of editing drawing on 30-some years of photography. I will surely work autobiographically again, but the modes of...

Brakhage begins here with Carlsbad Caverns as a stand-in for Plato's Cave and then responds to the philosopher's notion of inaccessible ideal forms...

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...