Stan Brakhage Movies

Short B/W film about the textures of the human skin and household objects, showing Brakhage in the morning as reality distorts around him. Revised in...

Visiting the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado, abandoned about 1275, Brakhage thought, "There is terror here." And so he returns again and...

"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...

This hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which...

Begins with brown light thru quartz crystal, ends with a candle wick burning, circled by boiling gold flecks.

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

“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...

Ken, Flo and Nisi Jacobs in the Syracuse Airport: this is what you might call baby-sitting in the swamp.

Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their "weave" with each other which...

While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, "Miss MacIntosh,...

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

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...

As a poem might be said to contain the night through a weave of words, so have I in this film attempted such a container with warp and woof of...

"In his description for A CHILD'S GARDEN, Brakhage quotes from poets Ronald Johnson and Charles Olson (and cites Johnson's poem "Beam 29" as...

Only at a crisis do I see both the scene as I've been trained to see it ( that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic–colors...

The film begins with a series of horizontally running ocean tide waves, sometimes with mountains in the background, hand-painted patterns, sometimes...

Hand painting, dye treatments and direct collage edited into 'themes and variations' that tell 'a thousand and one' stories. - Stan Brakhage

Section IV is the longest of the four parts and the one in which the photographic material from the past plays the most prominent role. We see more...

A visualization of the inner world of foetal beginnings, the infant, the baby, the child – a shattering of the ‘myths of childhood’...

A very personal lecture on filmmaker and friend Jim Davis.