Stan Brakhage

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 »

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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 »

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… 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 »

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“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 »

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Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight, were created without using a camera at all, as he pioneered the art of making images directly on film, by drawing, painting, and scratching. With these two volumes, we present the definitive Brakhage collection – fifty-six of his works, from across his career, in high-definition digital transfers.Read More »

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Featuring stylized visual storytelling, this rarely seen film by famed experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage was produced for the Colorado Department of Public Relations and is one of two films (the other being “Colorado Legend”) to explore Colorado myths. This film tells the story of the Ute people and the tension between the youth, “the Braves”, and an elder, “Smoking Water”. The cultural objects were provided by the University of Colorado Museum and Denver Art Museum.Read More »

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In 1960 the “Colorado Department of Public Relations”, undoubtedly eager to have more tourists falling down abandoned mine shafts in search of lost treasure, brought in Stan Brakhage to film this archetypal gold rush yarn. Stan gets to do a little urbex in a gorgeous snowy ghost town and then materializes a couple long-dead miners through double-exposed pipes, beer steins, and flashing knives. Narrated, naturally, through song.

A tale of two gold miners of the old west who struck it rich. The lonely life made them heavy drinkers, and one night when the heavyset and silent Dutchman wouldn’t talk to the feisty little Irishman, he was knifed to death. The Irishman was hanged and the whereabouts of the mine lies buried with him.Read More »