Movies: Stan Brakhage

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order....

Heading through Colorado Territory in search of gold and women, Alferd Packer and his group of bemused companions find themselves lost, starving and musically inspired by the obstacles they confront along the way, including a die-hard Confederate cyc...

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which n...

At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2010....

Inspired by a bad fall on a patch of black ice (that ultimately resulted in Brakhage's need for eye surgery), the filmmaker gives us something of a dreamlike descent through the fear and refractions of closed-eye vision regarding such an event....

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like...

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears tw...

A tribute to Stan Brakhage's pet dog Sirius, whose decompostion was recorded over 6 months after he had died....

"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 potential. The action of making The Dead kept me alive." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partner...

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 sorrow as we watch a solitary man in shadows in an unadorned house: ...

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s....

"Firstly, I revealed in salutary confession the secret filth of my misdeed, which had long been festering in stagnant silence; and I made it my custom to confess often, and thus to display the wounds of my blinded soul..." (Petrarch, 1352, in a lette...

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 visual (i.e., un-musical) theme. This film is composed of 35mm hand-painted images reduced to 16mm film, ...

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 - a kind of 'last testament,' if you will… an envisionment of the fle...

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" of textures). The tone of the film is pri...

Another of Brakhage’s works of “moving visual thinking,” Rage Net reminds one of the vibrant pioneering experiments of European animators of the 1920s....

Inspired in part by a dream he had of murdering his mother, Brakhage here gives us one of his profoundest meditations on human aggression....

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 of remembered bird-shape....

A bursting of mostly golden light forms as if heralding sunlight itself in their hurried (single-frame) display....

SONG 12: Verticals and shadows caught in glass traps (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969)....