Movies: Stan Brakhage

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....

Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, almost black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script....

A look at the inner workings of a hospital. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2011....

The culmination of a series of autobiographical films that Brakhage made about his family (collectively known as The Book of Family), Tortured Dust was shot as the filmmaker's children from his first marriage were beginning to leave the house, and ed...

'A loosely coiled length of yarn (story) ... wound on a reel' -- my parenthesis! This is a painted film (inspired by unpainted pictures): 'skins' of paint hung in a weave of light....

Avant garde short by Brakhage and CU-Boulder colleague Phil Solomon....

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

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's...

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...

SONG 9: Wedding source and substance (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969)....

part of the Preludes series (1996)...

Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes which gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues....

Four young men and a young woman sit in boredom. She smokes while one strums a lute, one looks at a magazine, and two fiddle with string. The door opens and in comes a young man, cigarette between his lips, a swagger on his face. The young woman laug...

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

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 Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969)....

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

One of the few Brakhage films featuring spoken dialogue and a central character, this sly and bitter polemic pits an actor (poet? director?) against an unseen audience. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007....

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, ...

Short film....

Maya Deren is a legend of avant-garde cinema. This authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker, poet and anthropologist features excerpts from her pioneering Meshes of the Afternoon and her unfinished documentary on Haiti, interviews with St...