Stan Brakhage

In the autobiographical traditional of earlier SINCERITIES, this film takes up the light-threads of our living 14 years ago when the Brakhage family found Home and ‘settled’, like they say, into some sense of permanence. This quality of living in one place tends to destroy most senses of chronology; thus, along lines-of-thought of growing and shifting physicality, events CAN seem to be occurring simultaneously (a thought-process ‘kin to that of THE DOMAIN OF THE MOMENT), and the memory of such a time IS prompted and sustained by details of living usually overlooked or taken-for-granted (such as Proust’s cookie which prompted ‘The Remembrance of Things Past’). Michael McClure’s ‘Fleas’ and Andrew Noren’s THE EXQUISITE CORPSE III were additional sources of inspiration for the making of this work.Read More »

Made with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts. This continuation of my autobiography is composed of film photographed by many people: Bruce Baillie, Jane Brakhage, Larry Jordan, and Stan Phillips, among others. Most of the footage is drawn from some 2,000 feet of ‘home movies,’ ‘out takes,’ and the like, salvaged from my photography over the years. It is of the Brakhage family’s coming into being. It is composed in the light of those electrical traces we call ‘memory’; and it is as true to that ‘thought process’ as I was enabled to make it.Read More »

This, the first completed reel of work-in-progress, draws on autobiographical energies and images which reflect the first 20 years of my living. I have three definitions of the word Sincerity to sustain my working along these lines of thought with this autobiographical material: (1) Ezra Pound’s marvelous mistranslation of a Chinese ideogram – Sincerity… the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally…(of which I would change, for my purposes, the last word to visually), (2) Robert Creeley’s trace-of-the-word for me on the back of a Buffalo restaurant menu Sym-keros… same-growth (Ceres) CREATE… of the same growth, and (3) Hollis Frampton’s track-of-it to ‘the greek’, viz – ‘a glazed pot (i. e. one which will hold water).’ This film might best be seen, then, as a graph of light equivalent to autobiographical thought process.Read More »

A “found foliage” film composed of insects, leaves, and other detritus sandwiched between two strips of perforated tape.Read More »

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 head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With the help of the attending hands, the mother expels the placenta. The infant, a baby girl, nurses. We return from time to time to the bath scene. By the end, dad’s excited; mother and daughter rest.Read More »

One of America’s finest filmmakers tackles “lovemaking” in its many varieties (hetrosexual, homosexual as well as various animals having sex). Without a soundtrack (as the artist always thought that sound was an aesthetic error in filmmaking), the film is shot with Brakhage’s characteristic visual rhythmns.Read More »

Quote:
While Stan Brakhage’s diverse output includes a wide variety of films in each period, there has always been a group that I’ve thought of as the “main line” of his work. Usually his strongest and most original films, they are also the ones that expand his limits, pushing his work into new territory. Even before the somnambulist-protagonist puts out his eyes in the early The Way to Shadow Garden, Brakhage’s long filmmaking career had begun to follow a particular trajectory, an arch that stretches further and further away from the given. The impulse has always been to obliterate social conventions of eyesight in favor of something more original, more unpredictable, more unruly.Read More »

Quote:
… almost like the Earth itself – the green ice covered rocks, the slicing feeling, the compressive feeling of the glaciers. The whole time I was watching I kept thinking that you were a master of the north, the arctic landscape – the red flowers in the dusky light, the deep blue light, the tall trees with running mists, and Jane looking… The ice, the water, the moss, the golden light. A visual symphony… – Hollis MeltonRead More »

Quote:
“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, but some flower that couldn’t exist except on film.”Read More »