Notes on the Popular Arts

The Town was a short propaganda film produced by the Office of War Information in 1945. It presents an idealized vision of American life, shown in...

A disgraced sea captain signs on as a crewman on a cargo ship. He discovers that the vessel is captained by the very man who stole his ship, a...

Dark blood red slow shifting tones (often embedded in dark) / (often shot-thru with parallel wave-like lines) composed of all previous shapes and...

A compilation of images co-creator Frank Mouris had collected from magazines interwoven with two narrations, one giving a mostly linear autobiography...

Constantly changing forms, a plains landscape. One of two films based on David and Diana's life in their house in Colorado, which had just burned...

An important early film by Stan Brakhage, which Joseph Cornell commissioned as a record of New York's Third Avenue elevated train before it was torn...

One of the few Brakhage films featuring spoken dialogue and a central character, this sly and bitter polemic pits an actor (poet? director?) against...

A walking figure emerges from a changing, circular cycle; his inner self emerges and precipitats a series of violent struggles with himself, adapting...

"Marlborough" and "The Arab", lounging on the pool terrace, are alienated characters in some future time, living in a world where art work comes to...

Motion Painting No. 1 is a 1947 experimental short animated film in which film artist Oskar Fischinger put images in motion to the music of Johann...

A carousel barker falls in love with a young woman. Both are fired from their jobs, and when the young woman becomes pregnant, the carousel barker...

"The Dead became my first work in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic...