Stan Brakhage

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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 »

Director Robert Gardner and legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage share an in-depth viewing of Gardner’s ethnographic masterwork, Forest of Bliss. The film is shown in its entirety, with Gardner occasionally pausing to elucidate, and Brakhage brilliantly observing tonality, poetic imagery, life, death, the unconscious, and, well, just being damned insightful.Read More »

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The Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969. They are seen as one of Brakhage’s major works and include the feature-length 23rd Psalm Branch, considered by some to be one of the filmmaker’s masterworks and described by film historian P. Adams Sitney as “an apocalypse of imagination.” One of the filmmaker’s most overtly political films, 23rd Psalm Branch is often interpreted as being Brakhage’s reaction to the Vietnam War.Read More »

An experimental film with various flashing lights, colors, and World War II footage. This is part of the Song series by Stan Brakhage.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
One of the very few Brakhage films to have a plot and be acted, this bitter and wise polemic pits an actor who constantly confesses his role against an unseen audience. He sarcastically mocks our belief in filmic truth, disclaiming the omnipotence we ascribe to him and the director and insists on the falsehood and artificiality of the art work. This is a very modern film of ambiguity, mixed tenses, skepticism, and ultimately, anguish at the realization that the artist is both con-man and magician, impotently straining for unattainable perfection yet inevitably being taken seriously by an audience panting to be duped.Read More »

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The Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage first appeared on Screening Room in May, 1973 to screen and discuss the films Eye Myth, Desist Film, Moth Light, and Blue Moses. Screening Room was a Boston television series that for almost ten years offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) television station. The series was developed and hosted by the filmmaker Robert Gardner who was Chairman of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University for many years. This unique television series explored genres which are rarely found on broadcast television including, animation, documentary, and experimental films.Read More »

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Finally reunited, Stan Brakhage’s masterpiece Dog Star Man is an experimental movie without sound. A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time and space. If the movie tends sometime toward abstraction, there is still a kind of off-the-tracks narration here. Dog Star Man could be about a man, lost in mountain, struggling to survive, and as he fell the breath of death on his shoulder, remembering trough flashes his wife and son.Read More »