Stan Brakhage Movies

This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with streaks of light and vibrantly colored forms. There appears, frame center, the tapered shape of a...

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...

This is the realization of a 30 year old dream, a wish of the young filmmaker to film a modern Faust which finally came to a fulfillment as...

A woman and two men talking, seen one by one, in a montage of three movements that make up a fast-slow-fast cycle. The second movement is composed of...

This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak - a memory piece, a "piecing-together" of the experience of living there. The consciousness...

What shall one say? – S.B.

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

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...

An attempt to conjure pictorially, from the mind, an image that isn't referential: "...I'd like to give something back, not a picture of a flower,...

In this non-orange negative of a hand-painted film, a series of luminously pastel shapes – often patches of color against a stark white...

“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 is one of the most elaborately edited of all the hand-painted films of late - a Haydenesque complexity of thematic variations on a totally...

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...

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to...

They are travelogues in photographic fact and in the mind. Unable to afford printing them, I had stuck them in a drawer. The first was made in 1991,...

A tale of two gold miners of the old west who struck it rich. The lonely life made them heavy drinkers, and one night when the heavyset and silent...

CRICKET REQUIEM is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed film which juxtaposes bent, sometimes saw-tooth, scratch shapes multiply colored in...

An imagery sharp as stars and hard as the thought-universe (turning back upon itself) absorbed in gentle patterns of contemplation. – S.B.

Begins with white lamp post, green tree leaves, and window, ends with flashing window light on brown wall of motel room.

The third in this series of Imagnostic Films seems particularly magic to me in as much as I cannot even remember the photographic source of these...