Stan Brakhage Movies

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

Persian Series #11 begins with a "window" of yellow paint adrift in the full frame of multicolored paint-shapes. Alternating black-space/white-space...

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...

Very pale, thin, hieroglyphic pinks, greens and blues in a white space which is thickened over by ribbed mashes of these colors which "dissolve" into...

Colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the two began with strips of film Brakhage had painted on by hand, photographing them frame by...

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

"The ecstatic, mythic montage of Alaskan landscapes" is also "about the act of making" and an antidote to the stodgy notion that life crawled forth...

This is a hand painted, step printed work which views Occam's economical vision of life (The Razor's Edge') as something more thread-like: a...

Sharp edged "chunks" of color set in black, straight, often multicolored, lines piercing shapes, imprisoning them, until they are fragmented bits of...

Persian Series #15 is a rapid shift of patterns black & white playing off against muted coils of color.

A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images...

Persian Series #16 is an even more exaggerated contrast of color and black-and-white patterning.

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...

What shall one say? – S.B.

Shots of city and country life come together to form an impressionistic whole. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work...

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...

Persian Series #17 is a series of quite distinct globules of paint brilliantly colored and shifting as if vertically in the plane (as different from...

Persian Series #14 is composed of muted color-shapes shifting variably in juxtaposition and contrast with high-contrast black & white abstract...

Brakhage's frame-by-frame hand carvings and etchings directly into the film emulsion, sometimes photographically combined with paint, are illuminated...