Stan Brakhage Movies

Stan Brakhage with a movie camera. Winter seascapes.

“Films made by the five Brakhage children; Brakhage arranged them in this form but did not edit them.” –Robert Haller

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...

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...

Peripheral envisionment of daily life as the mind has it - i.e., a terrifying ecstasy of (hand-painted) synapting nerve ends back-firing from...

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...

Persian Series #17 is a series of quite distinct globules of paint brilliantly colored and shifting as if vertically in the plane (as different from...

The last of Brakhage's longer works. Part of the "Vancouver Island" films. "Purple flashes are followed by a curtain of purple and blues, first...

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...

Song of the Mushroom (2002), completed in December 2002, is a collaboration between filmmakers Joel Haertling and Stan Brakhage. With interest in...

Now that "II" has been completed, one would suppose that the above film "I" is "One"... unless, of course, this film's spoken title is "aye-aye" or...

In Section II we see a series of discrete sequences showing the children, now somewhat older, in different types of play. They manipulate tiny...

This film is a hand-painted combination of shapes which suggest, as appropriately colored, jungle, open veldt, horizontals of grasses, shag-shape...

"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...

Begins with raccoon in a rose light, ends with fading face of child.

This, painted in the hospital while recovering from cancer surgery in 1996, is - it seems to me - very related to De Kooning's Alzheimer's paintings....

A decade and a half ago, poet Robert Kelly told me that the "crucial work" of our time might be what he calls "the dream work": I hope, with this...

Made during the height of the Vietnam War, Stan Brakhage has said of this film that he was hoping to bring some clarity to the subject of war....

A very personal lecture on filmmaker and friend Jim Davis.