Born an orphan in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933. Filmmaker since 1952.
As of the New Year 1999, still going along ...
Music by James Tenney.
Brakhage's first film, inspired by Italian Neo-Realism, suggests a tentative sexual encounter between a teenage boy and girl who meet under the city viaducts.
1952, 16mm, b&w/so, 25.5m, $75
Internationally acclaimed as the classic of its genre. The camera joins a drunken adolescent party and participates in the expression of desire and frustration.
"The best film in the 1950s; breathtaking camera work; entire cinematic conception and execution is brilliant." - Willard Maas
1954, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m, $25
Sound by Brakhage.
Blinding himself, a young man escapes his frightening room to enter the even more terrifying beauty of Shadow Garden. "... creates a tormented, claustrophobic world ... this wild study of a tortured youth has astonishing moments of brilliance." - Film No. 12
1954, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
Music by John Cage.
Portrait of Jesse Collins: a daydream nightmare in the surrealist tradition.
1955, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
A series of terrifying dramas of male-female relationships offset against the background of a New York tenement.
"... a search into the hidden, unspoken, elusive drama of relations among men and women ...." - Parker Tyler
Awards: Award of Distinction, Creative Film Foundation; Prize of the Selection Jury, Brussels Int'l Film Festival, 1958.
1955, 16mm, b&w/so, 12m, $35
On a theme suggested by Joseph Cornell. A sharp change in Brakhage's work, we see New York's Third Avenue El (since demolished) as though through the eyes of a child on a merry-go-round.
1955, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $20
"A bold attempt, full of visual sensibility, to use living animals, unconscious of their roles, as abstract counters in a tone poem of color and chiaroscuro." - Parker Tyler
1956, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25
Sound by Brakhage.
These two films investigate frustrations in loving, DAYBREAK with a girl as object, WHITEYE with the camera as subject.
"... a winter landscape transforms itself, through the magic of motion, temperament and light, into pure poetry of white." - Jonas Mekas
1957, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $25
"The greens of the forest, the flesh tones of the lovers, the browns of earth, the sky and the sun evolve an expression of living in which the light consumes everything except the flesh of loving." - Cinema 16
1957, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $20
The daylight shadow of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose held in hand reflects both sun and moon like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promisory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams, becoming the amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning. The trees change color and lose their leaves for the morn, they become the complexity of branches in which the shadow man hangs himself.
"[A] film in the first person. The protagonist, like the members of the audience, is a voyeur, and his eventual suicide is a result of his inability to participate in the 'untutored' seeing experience of a child. ANTICIPATION consists of a flow of colors and shapes which constantly intrigues us by placing the unknown object next to the known in a significant relationship, by metamorphosing one visual statement into another." - P. Adams Sitney
1958, 16mm, color/si, 42m, $125
"Sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a 'medium' cat." - Cinema 16
1959, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $21 I was coming to terms with decay of a dead thing and the decay of the memories of a loved being that had died and it was undermining all abstract concepts of death. The form was being cast out by probably the same physical need that makes dogs dance and howl in rhythm around a corpse. I was taking song as my inspiration and for the rhythm structure, just as dogs dancing, prancing around a corpse, and howling in rhythm-structures or rhythm-intervals might be considered like the birth of some kind of son.
1959, 16mm, color/si, 12m, $35
"The first months of marriage, with moments of mutual awareness, frightening understandings, lovemaking." - Cinema 16
1959, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $30
"... Brakhage's treatment of the birth of his daughter. Here he unleashes the full power of his technique, so apt to become abstractly unintelligible when left to his own devices, on a specific subject. The result is a picture so forthright, so full of primitive wonder and love, so far beyond civilization in its acceptance that it becomes an experience like few in the history of the movies." - Arthur Winsten, The New York Post
Exhibition: Brussels Int'l Film Festival, 1964
1959, 16mm, color/si, 12m, $35
"... a very sombre and intense visual poem, a black lyric, if you like, but full of an open dramatic energy which puts it well above a formal or rhetorical exercise on Time and Eternity. In the visual form of the monuments of the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the persistent and impenetrable geometric masonry gets to be less a symbol of death than a death-like sensation." - Donald Sutherland
Europe, weighted down so much with that past, was THE DEAD. I was always Tourist there; I couldn't live in it. The graveyard could stand for all my view of Europe, for all the concerns with past art, for involvement with symbol. 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 potential. The action of making THE DEAD kept me alive.
Award: Brussels Int'l Film Festival, 1964
1960, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $30
Only at a crisis do I see both the sense as I've been trained to see it (that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic, colors as we've been trained to call a color a color, and so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through the optic nerves - spots before my eyes, so to speak - and it's a very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I've seen that every time a child was born .... Now none of that was in WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING; and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed all of my seeing at such a time.
Award: Brussels Int'l Film Festival, 1964
1961, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
I had a camera with which I could make multiple superimpositions spontaneously. It had been lent to me for a week. I was also given a couple of rolls of color film which had been through an intensive fire. The chance that the film would not record any image at all left me free to experiment and try to create the sense of the daily world in which we live, and what it meant to me. I wanted to record our home, and yet deal with it as being that area from which the films by Stan Brakhage arise, and try to make one arise at the same time.
1962, 16mm, b&w/si/so, 4m, $20 "A meat enigma spoken in eternal language of director, con man, and magician. It's about the sham flesh that men create to dam the streaming of truth from their muscles and senses ... a molecule of revelation in the shape of a drama thrown off by the artist between ANTICIPATION and DOG STAR MAN." - Michael McClure
1962, 16mm, b&w/so, 11m, $35
Three TV "concretes."
1963, 16mm, b&w/si, 5m, $20
Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black.
"Brakhage made MOTHLIGHT without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine." - Jonas Mekas
"MOTHLIGHT is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter's struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. MOTHLIGHT is on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being." - Ken Kelman
Awards: Brussels Int'l Film Festival, 1964; Spoleto Film Festival, 1966.
1963, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
"DOG STAR MAN is the most self-sufficient and innocent film ... in the sense that Chaplin is. No music is needed to watch Chaplin ... because his dance is all the music that we need.
"DOG STAR MAN is silent in the sense that the greatest silent films are.
"In DOG STAR MAN the film itself becomes a dance of editing and moves as the best silent actors do with their physical movements with arm, leg, to tongue and face .... The film breathes and is an organic and surging thing ... it is a colossal lyrical adventure-dance of image in every variation of color." - Michael McClure, Artforum
1961-1964, 16mm, color/si, 78m, $200
The opening statement, complete in itself, of Brakhage's epic drama of the creation of the universe.
"PRELUDE is a declaration both of the unity of the world (and Brakhage's lyrical feeling of identification with it) and love for woman, expressed in transcendent, cosmic terms. His images here include both the microscopic and telescopic, and range from solar explosions to brief glimpses of the beloved's body ... the degree of spiritual, cosmic feeling is remarkable. Brakhage has gone further than any of his fellows whose work I have seen." - Paul Beckley, New York Herald Tribune
"Four basic visual themes dominate PRELUDE: 1) the four elements, air, earth, fire and water; 2) the cosmos represented in stock footage of the sun, the moon, and the stars; 3) Brakhage's household - himself, his dog and cat, his baby and particularly his wife's nude body; and 4) artificial, yet purely filmic devices such as painting or scratching on film, distorting lenses, double exposure and clear leader." - P. Adams Sitney
1961, 16mm, color/si, 25m, $75
"In the tradition of Ezra Pound's vorticism, PART 1 is a Noh drama, the exploration in minute detail of a single action and all its ramifications. The formal construction of the film, the interrelationships and significance of the images, has been woven on an extremely subtle level. Each shot appears only as an isolated piece ... appreciated (as) it is understood within the context of the entire mosaic." - P. Adams Sitney
1962, 16mm, color/si, 30m, $90
"The third movement of Brakhage's masterwork; the extension of the bardic art into living film ... images of life, regeneration ... spring and early morning." - P. Adams Sitney
1963, 16mm, color/si, 7m, $20
"The fourth and penultimate section of Brakhage's film myth. The marriage of striving and fertility ... midsummer and high noon." - P. Adams Sitney
1964, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $35
"The fall and evening in this cycle of all history, all mankind; returning via a Fall into the generative Dream of PRELUDE. Death, cast into the future by the question, 'What is death like?' is recognized as the lens through which we grasp the limitlessness of life." - P. Adams Sitney
1964, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
Sound by Brakhage.
Inspired by a statement in a letter from poet Robert Kelly - "The truth of the matter is this: that man lives in a fire of waters and will live eternally in the first taste" - this film is a play of light and sounds upon that theme.
1965, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
In honor of the cat, so named, and the goddess of all cats which she was named after (that taking shape in the Egyptian mind of the spirit of cats), and of birth (as she was giving kittens when the pictures were taken), of sex as source, and finally of death (as this making was the salvage therefrom and in memoriam).
1965, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
Includes three short films: BLUEWHITE, "an intonation of child birth"; BLOOD'S TONE, "a golden nursing film"; VEIN, "a film of baby Buddha masturbation."
1965, 16mm, color/si, 10m, $30
Two portraits in relation to each other, the first of Robert Creeley, the second of Michael McClure. (These companion films were reduced to 8mm for necessary inclusion in XV SONG TRAITS but may also be rented in their original forms as here indicated.)
1965, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
This, an early work which I had assumed destroyed, was discovered in 1995 (by someone who wishes to remain anonymous) and thus is available for "tone pome" time-travel to the '50s.
1965, color/si, 3m, $20 A long myth drawn directly onto the film's surface, which is painted, dyed, treated so that it will grow controlled crystals and mold-as-textures of the figures and forms of the drama - some images stamped thru melted wax crayon techniques, some images actual objects (such as moth wings) collaged directly on the celluloid ... so that the protagonists of this myth (as listed in the title) weave thru crystalline structures and organic jungles of the colorful world of hypnagogic vision - edited into "themes and variation" that tell "a thousand and one" stories while, at the same time, evoking Baroque music ... the primary musical inspiration being the harpsichord sonatas of Dominico Scarlatti.
1968, 16mm, color/si, 26m, $75
A visualization of the inner world of foetal beginnings, the infant, the baby, the child - a shattering of the "myths of childhood" through revelation of the extremes of violent terror and overwhelming joy of that world darkened to most adults by their sentimental remembering of it ... a "tone poem" for the eye - very inspired by the music of Oliver Messiaen. (The visual imagery was inspired by Messiaen - NOT the Sound Track.)
I recommend to those interested in the greatest visual experience of this film that they leave the sound track off and look at it silently. I suggest that those interested in studying the "sound problem" of motion picture aesthetic take this opportunity to experience the film both silently and then with sound track. My study of this particular Section #1 has convinced me to leave the soundtrack version available - for "study" purposes only - until the entire SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD, in all its sections, is completed; and then I will withdraw all sound prints and replace them with the silent version only.
Note: A sound version of this section of the film is still available.
1967, 16mm, color/si, 25m, $75
(A continuation of the above-described work.)
1969, 16mm, color/si, 40m, $120
(A continuation of the above-described work.)
1969, 16mm, color/si, 25m, $75
(A continuation of the above-described work.)
1970, 16mm, color/si, 45m, $135
THE ANIMALS OF EDEN AND AFTER ... is too mysterious, to me, for me to be able to write anything about it except that it seems to be the best film I've ever made.
1970, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $105
The Machine (of Eden) operates via "spots" - from sun's disks (of the camera lens) thru emulsion grains (within which, each, a universe might be found) and snow's flakes (echoing technical aberrations on film's surface) blots (upon the lens itself) and the circles of sun and moon, etcetera; these "mis-takes" give birth of "shape" (which, in this work, is "matter" subject and otherwise) amidst a weave of thought: (I add these technicalities, here, to help viewers defeat the habits of classical symbolism so that this work may be immediately seen, in its own light): the "dream" of Eden will speak for itself.
1970, 16mm, color/si, 14m, $30
The term "The Weir-Falcon Saga" appeared to me, night after night, at the end of a series of dreams: I was "true" to the feeling, tho not the images, of those dreams in the editing of this and the following two films. The three films "go" very directly together, in the order of their making (as listed); yet each seems to be a clear film in itself. At this time, I tend to think they constitute a "Chapter No. 2" of The Book of Film I've had in mind these last five years (considering SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD as Chapter No. 1); and yet these "Weir-Falcon" films occur to me as distinct from any filmmaking I have done before. They engender, in me, entirely "new" considerations. I cannot describe them, but there is an excerpt from "The Spoils" by Basil Bunting which raises hair on the back of my neck similarly:
"Have you seen a falcon stoop / accurate, unforeseen / and absolute, between / wind-ripples over harvest? Dread / of what's to be, is and has been - / were we not better dead? / His wings churn air / to flight. / Feathers alight / with sun, he rises where / dazzle rebuts our stare, / wonder our fright."
1970, 16mm, color/si, 30m, $90
In the fall of 1971 I began photographing in the Allegheny Coroner's Office in downtown Pittsburgh. Thanks to the help of Sally Dixon, head of the Film Department at the Carnegie Museum, and the kind cooperation of Coroner Wecht, I was to be permitted to photograph Autopsy - a term which comes from the Greek meaning: "The act of seeing with one's own eyes." Within two weeks I had completed the photography; and I felt at that time that this film would be the third in a trilogy beginning with the film EYES and followed by DEUS EX.
"... Stan Brakhage, entering, with his camera, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes.
"What was to be done in that room, Stan? And then, later, with the footage? I think it must have been mostly to stand aside: to 'clear out,' as much as possible, with the baggage of your own expectations, even, as to what a work of art must look like; and to see, with your own eyes, what coherence might arise within a universe for which you could decree only the boundaries." - Hollis Frampton
1971, 16mm, color/si, 32m, $95
This then the property of many angels.
1971, 16mm, color/si, 2m, $20
After wishing for years to be given-the-opportunity of filming some of the more "mystical" occupations of our Times - some of the more obscure Public Figures which the average imagination turns into "bogeyman" ... viz: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.: - I was at last permitted to ride in a Pittsburgh police car, camera in hand, the final several days of September 1970 - this opportunity due largely to the efforts of a Pittsburgh newspaper photographer, Mike Chikaris - who was sympathetic to my film show at the Carnegie Institute and responded to my wish as stated on that occasion - therefore pleaded my "cause" eloquently with Police Inspectors of his acquaintance: my thanks to him, to Sally Dixon of the Carnegie Institute and to the Policemen who created the situation that made this film possible.
1971, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $105
I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUS EX in West Pennsylvania Hospital of Pittsburgh; but I was especially inspired by the memory of one incident in an Emergency Room of SF's Mission District: while waiting for medical help, I had held myself together by reading an April-May 1965 issue of "Poetry Magazine"; and the following lines from Charles Olson's "Cole's Island" had especially centered the experience, "touchstone" of DEUS EX, for me: Charles begins the poem with the statement, "I met Death - ," and then: "He didn't bother me, or say anything. Which is / not surprising, a person might not, in the circumstances; / or at most a nod or something. Or they would. But they wouldn't, / or you wouldn't think to either, if it was Death. And / He certainly was, the moment I saw him." The film begins with this sense of such an experience and goes on to envision the whole battle of hospital on these grounds, thru to heart surgery seen as equivalent to Aztec ritual sacrifice ... the lengths men go to to avoid so simple and straight a relationship with Death as Charles Olson managed on/in "Cole's Island."
1971, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $105
This the only all-inclusive autobiography I've yet managed; and as I'm still alive, it is to be understood as a metaphor which defines the limits of expectation.
1971, 16mm, 2m, color/si, $20
Ken, Flo and Nisi Jacobs in the Syracuse Airport: this is what you might call baby-sitting in the swamp.
1971, 16mm, color/si, 3m, $20
This film, one of the most perfect it has ever been given to me to make, was inspired by the series of paintings of the same title by Edward Hicks.
1971, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25
A thumbnail History of the Western World, all centered around the basketball court.
1971, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25
Directly in the tradition of SEXUAL MEDITATION #1: Motel, this "sequel" does explore further possibilities of nudes in a room.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
This, the third of the Sexual Meditation Series, might also be seen as a triangular portrait of Julia and P. Adams Sitney and Jane Brakhage.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 3m, $20
This film evolves from several years' observation of the sexual energy which charges the world of business and the qualities of palatial environ which this energy often creates. It is one of the most perfect films that has been given to me to make.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
This film takes its cue from that ultimate situation of Sex/Med/masturbation - the loft-and-lonely hotel room. It is thus easily twice the length and complexity of any other in the series.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25
This film takes all the masturbatory themes of previous "Sexual Meditations" back to the source in pre-adolescent dreams. OPEN FIELD is in the mind, of course, and exists as a weave of trees, grasses, waters and bodies poised and fleeting at childhood's end. The scene is lit as by sun and moon alike and haunted by the pursuant adult.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25
This is the rachety Japanese wood-block style - a short "spook movie."
1972, 16mm, color/si, 3.5m, $20
LIGHT was primary in my consideration. All senses of "process" are (to me) based primarily on "thought-process"; and "thought-process" is based primarily on "memory re-call"; and that, as any memory process (all process finally) is electrical (firing of nerve connection) and expresses itself most clearly as a "back-firing" of nerve endings in the eye which DO become visible to us (usually eyes closed) as "brain movies" - as Michael McClure calls them. When we are not re-constructing "a scene" (re-calling something once seen), then we are watching (on the "screen" of closed eye-lids) the very PROCESS itself.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 13.5m, $40
The classic riddle was meant to be heard of course. Its answers are contained in its questions; and on the smallest piece of itself this possibility depends upon SOUND - "utterly," like they say ... the pun is pivot. Therefore, my RIDDLE OF LUMEN depends upon qualities of LIGHT. All films do, of course. But with THE RIDDLE OF LUMEN the "hero" of the film is light itself. It is the film I'd long wanted to make - inspired by the sense and specific formal possibility of the classical English Language riddle ... only one appropriate to film and, thus, as distinct from language as I could make it.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 17m, $50
Phos equals light, but then I did also want that word within the title which would designate place, as within the nationalities of "the fabulous" - a specific country of the imagination with tangible shores, etc. The film adheres strictly to the ordinary form of the classic fable.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 10m, $30
"Wold" because the word refers to "forests" which poets later made "plains" and because the work also contains the rustic sense "to kill" - this then my laboriously painted vision of the god of the forest.
1972, 16mm, color/si, $20
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.
1973, 16mm, color/si, 27m, $80
"EN"? - as the dictionary has it: "made of, of, or belonging to" (then) Aquarius/an. This is my first conscious make of a "tone poem" film.
1974, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
This is a portrait of the man I choose to call "the greatest I've known": Clancy, whom the fates surnamed Sheehy, personifies for me that which is simply human beyond condition and all conditioning.
1974, 16mm, color/si, 4.5m, $20
The "Dynamo theories" of Henry Adams portrayed first person/sexual vision: an American businessman as lord of all he surveys.
1974, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
Pun on "light" intended - that short preceeding expellation of breath perhaps the "subject matter" of this film which centers on consideration of death. It is the third tone poem film and did much surprise me by thus completing a trilogy of the "4 classical Elements."
1974, 16mm, color/si, 5.5m, $20
The quote is Joseph Conrad answering a critic who found his books too long. Conrad replied that he could write a novel on the inside of a match-book cover, thus (as above), but that he "preferred to elaborate." The "Life" of the film is scratched on black leader. The "elaboration" of color tonalities is as the mind's eye responds to hieroglyph.
1974, 16mm, color/si, 7.5m, $20
"HER" to me is always Jane, in the first place, but also Hera: "goddess of women and marriage," naturally enough. Then, too, as it is a hymn of light, and as he/me feels the self that way, it sings of and to itself.
1974, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m, $20
A loosely coiled length of yarn (story) ... wound on a reel - my parenthesis! This is a painted film (inspired by Nolde's "unpainted pictures").
1974, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
1: SUN 2: not cap: GOLD - used in alchemy 3: the sun-god of the ancient Romans; but then also, as I understand it, a French word for earth, wherefrom we get our "sail"; and then (puns always intended, as I hear them): soul .... This also, then, a tone poem film.
1974, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
The "STAR," as it is singular, is the sun; and it is metaphored, at the beginning of this film, by the projector anyone uses to show forth. Then the imaginary sun begins its course throughout whatever darkened room this film is seen within. At "high noon" (of the narrative) it can be imagined as if in back of the screen, and then to shift its imagined light-source gradually back thru aftertones and imaginings of the "stars" of the film till it achieves a one-to-one relationship with the moon again. This "sun" of the mind's eye of every viewer does not necessarily correspond with the off-screen "pictured sun" of the film; but anyone who plays this game of illumination will surely see the film in its most completely conscious light. Otherwise, it simply depicts (as Brancusi put it): "One of those days I would not trade for anything under heaven."
1974, 16mm, color/si, 22m, $65
The film is dedicated to James Broughton.
This is the first sound film I've completed since 1962 - the first sync-sound ever. It is a philosophical film ... extending the realm of BLUE MOSES. Its finest viewer, so far, has written: "The sun, - moon - and stars, really are the footprints of God. - / "- and the broken fragments of the mirror that reflects reality. - / "- and they are quite beautiful. I had not seen them before. -" - John Newell
This project was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 19m, $60
"All that is is light." - Dun Scotus Erigena
"To see a world in a grain of sand." - William Blake
These the primary impulses while working on this film. It is dedicated to Jim Davis who showed me the "first spark" of refracted film light.
1974, 16mm, color/si, 71m, $135
This is a series of ten deliberately untitled films, each separated on the reel by several feet of black leader. As I wish also to make them individually identifiable, I'll provide the following description of beginning and end shots of each: No. 1 begins with blue negative face of child, ends with single centered eye; No. 2 begins with blowing snow, ends with lamp stand and lights of the city; No. 3 begins with landscape/sunset thru mist, ends with window sill; No. 4 begins with green tiled bathroom, ends with golden mirrored image of cameraman; No. 5 begins with back of airplane seat, ends with horizontal streaks of bold light; No. 6 begins with brown light thru quartz crystal, ends with candle wick burning and circled by boiling gold flecks; No. 7 begins with raccoon in rose light, ends with fading face of child; No. 8 begins with white lamp post, green tree leaves, and window, and ends with flashing window light on brown wall of motel room; No. 9 begins with rocks, tree trunk and plants in glow of light, ends with green and gold forest scene; No. 10 begins with flash of scratched "lightning," ends with moving dot, screen fading out.
1975, 16mm, color/si, 40m, $120
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 20,000 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.
This project was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
1975, 16mm, color/si, 40m, $120
Originally shot in Super 8mm; enlarged to 16mm.
1976, 16mm, color/si, 24m (18fps), $70 Four films verging on portraiture, converging to make a drama for all seasons, starring: Jane Brakhage as The Dreamer; Bob Benson as The Magnificent Stranger; Omar Beagle as The Snow Plow Man; and Jimmy Ryan Morris as The Poet and as Doc Holliday.
1976, 16mm, color/si, 25m, $75
The following films were all made in 1976. I do not wish to describe them.
When I entered films in the Experimental Film Competition of the 1958 World's Fair, I included the following statement in protest to their demand for "summary of the subject" (description). I've finally got around to reading my own statement and taking it seriously. In 1958 I did provide descriptions of each film entered - my only mistake. Now I simply quote the clarity of that long ago protest, finally comprehended:
"I want it understood that this 'summary' is written for identification purposes only and that it is not intended as a statement by the artist on his work. It is my belief that statements by the artist, particularly in print, aesthetically speaking, would better have been included in that work in the first place.
"If a film is a work of moving visual art, it is its own subject and subject only to itself. The extent to which a film can be described is the extent to which it is deficient as a work of visual art. If the 'summary of the subject' of a film can be interpreted as that which is intended to inspire perception in the viewer, rather than as that which attempts to describe the film for the viewer, then (the title) is my 'summary of the subject.'"
Note: Films are for sale in 16mm. Absence
1976, S8mm, color/si, 8m, $25
Airs
1976, S8mm, color/si, 20m, $60
Desert
1976, S8mm, color/si, 11m, $35
The Dream, NYC, The Return, The Flower
1976, S8mm, color/si, 24.5m, $75
Gadflies
1976, S8mm, color/si, 12.5m, $40
Highs
1976, S8mm, color/si, 16.5m, $80
Rembrandt, Etc., and Jane
1976, S8mm, color/si, 17.5m, $55
Sketches
1976, S8mm, color/si, 9m, $30
Trio
1976, S8mm, color/si, 6.5m, $20
Window
1976, S8mm, color/si, 10.5m, $30
This film was conceived about 10 years ago when I heard Norman O. Brown define "Tragedy" as "goat-song" (or as Webster has it: "Greek tragoidia fr. tragos goat + aiedein to sing; prob. fr. the satyrs represented by the original chorus"). I disagree with the last part of the Webster explanation and tend to think that the quality of sound of goats crying did prompt the Greeks to choose this term for their drama. In any case, the film TRAGOEDIA is also ironic (thus, perhaps the Latin of its title) as often is goat "lamentation"; and finally I should quote this from O.E.D.: "As to the reason of the name many theories have been offered, some even disputing the connexion with 'goat.'"
1976, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $105
Here are four films in contemplation upon those events which are so centered upon one moment that chronology seems almost obliterated or at least unimportant in remembrance. Most animals seem, to me, to inhabit this eventuality as a norm. I was permitted to share such experience, camera in hand, with several creatures these four non-times; but it was the memory of those experiences which made it possible to edit a formal equivalent for the continuity art of film.
1977, 16mm, color/si, 18m, $55
On July 4, 1976, I and my camera toured the state of Colorado with Governor Richard D. Lamm, as he traveled in parades with his children, appeared at dinners, lectured, etc. On July 20, I spent the morning in his office in the state capitol and the afternoon with him and his wife in a television studio, then with Mrs. Lamm greeting guests to the governor's mansion and finally with Governor Lamm in his office again. These two days of photography took me exactly one year to edit into a film which wove itself thru multiple superimpositions into a study of light and power.
1977, 16mm, color/si, 60m, $135
This begins the fourth chapter of The Book of Film and entertains directly the considerations of chapter two (THE WEIR-FALCON SAGA, THE MACHINE OF EDEN, and THE ANIMALS OF EDEN AND AFTER). Person begins to be defined by what it is not. It might be said that chapter one (SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD) set forth birth and being, chapter two - consciousness, chapter three (SINCERITY) - self-consciousness; thus SOLDIERS AND OTHER COSMIC OBJECTS begins that strictly philosophical task of distinguishing (from, in this case, the rituals and trials of public school). I like to think of it as a work that Ludwig Wittgenstein might have found more enjoyable.
1977, 16mm, color/si, 20.75m, $60 This is the first clear vision I've had of the hot-blooded dinosaurs still living among us.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
The film begins with the image of a dead bird. The mind moves to forget, as well as to remember: this film, in the tradition of THOT-FAL'N, graphs the process of forgetfulness against all oddities of remembered bird-shape. The film might best be seen along with SIRIUS REMEMBERED and THE DEAD as the third part of a trilogy.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 15m (18fps), $45
A series of narrative events, stories if you like, but so clustered visually as to have a center, so to speak, slightly off center.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 13m (18fps), $35 16mm Sale: $411.40 A friend of many years' acquaintance showed me the duplicity of myself. And, midst guilt and anxiety, I came to see that duplicity often shows itself forth in semblance of sincerity. Then a dream informed me that SINCERITY IV, which I had just completed, was such a semblance. The dream ended with the word "Duplicity" scratched white across the closed eyelids (as the title "The Weir-Falcon Saga" had been given to me). I saw that the film in question demonstrated a duplicity of relationship between the Brakhages and animals (Totemism) and environs (especially trees), visiting friends (Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Donald Sutherland, Angelo DiBenedetto and Jerome Hill among them) and people-at-large. I saw that the film shifted its compositions equally along a line of dark shapes as well as light, and that it did not progress (as did earlier Sincerities) but was rather a correlative of SINCERITY I.
Accordingly I changed the title to "Duplicity."
1978, 16mm, color/si, 23m, $70
This, the second film of the continuing autobiographical Duplicity series, is composed of superimpositions much as the mind "dupes" remembered experience into some semblance of, say, composed surety rather than imbalanced accuracy - as thought may even warp "scene" into symmetry, or "face" into multitudinous mask. What will have been becomes what will be being. I've tried to "give the lie" to this genesis of all white-lying.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 20m, $60
Four films so related to each other as to be an equivalent to that frightful dreaming which makes Wake of the following day, so that it be spent mourning the events of the night. A decade & 1/2 ago, poet Robert Kelly told me that the "crucial work" of our time might be what he calls "the dream work": I hope, with this SERIES, to have entertained his challenge more thoughtfully than with any previous "dream" filmmaking. In homage to Sigmund Freud and Surrealism, this film proposes clear visual alternatives to the consideration of both "The Interpretation of ..." and all previous representations of ... dreaming.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 20m, $60
Two short films, the first NOT about purity itself, whatever that might be, but rather an equivalent of the process of searching for purity in the mind ... the second film, then, thought's rebound from that.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 5m (18fps), $20
In the autobiographical tradition of the 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 occuring simultaneously (a thot-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 I" were additional sources of inspiration for the making of this work.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $105
It is a wooden silver-retrieving sluice, thus light-catch awash with something like "cheek and jowl clippings of Argentine bulls" (as Hollis Frampton reminds us) and many chemical residues of earth. My mind has grown TREE out of the forest of all of it.
1978, 16mm, b&w/si, 6m (18fps), $20 16mm This film describes a psychological state 'kin to "moon-struck," its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of "falling away" from conscious thought. The film can only be said to "describe" or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the "actors" in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Philip Whalen, are figments of this Thought-Fallen PROCESS as are their images in the film to themselves being photographed.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 9m (18fps), $25 16mm 1966/1978, 16mm, color/si, 30m (18fps), $90 This work, created in regular 8mm a decade ago, was in great danger (as all the SONGS) of being lost forever due to deterioration of the original and all lab masters. Despite great expense, I've managed to enlarge the original (step-printed) into a 16mm master. I chose this film (above all other SONGS) FIRST because the multiple splices & hand-painted sections of it endangered it most AND because I fear the war-inclination of this society at this time once again.
"... an apocalypse of the imagination." - P. Adams Sitney
1966/1978, 16mm, color/si, 30m (18fps), $90 The first film of mine which is so very much there where it's at THAT it deserves visual symbol as title and no further explanation from me at/et? all.
1979, 16mm, color/si, 6m (18fps), $20 16mm "... 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 dark red flowers in the dusky light, the deep blue light, the tall trees with the running mists, and Jane looking ... the ice, the water, the moss, the golden light. A visual symphony ...." - Hollis Melton
1979, 16mm, color/si, 17m, $50
THE ROMAN NUMERAL SERIES is dedicated to Don Yannacito.
I
This begins a new series of films which would ordinarily be called "abstract," "non-objective," "non-representational," etc. I cannot tolerate any of those terms and, in fact, had to struggle against all such historical concepts to proceed with my work. Midst creative process, the sound "imagnostic" kept ringing in my ears. It seems to be an enjambment of Latin and Greek; but Charlton T. Lewis' Elementary Latin Dictionary gives me (via Guy Davenport) "image" ... Sanskrit = AIC = "like," GNOSIS "knowledge," GNOSTIC = AGNOSCO = "to recognize/to know" and the happier IMAGINOUSUS "full of fancies"/"fantasies," illustrated by Catullus' singular use (perhaps creation of the term?) in the line "His mind solidly filled with fancies of a girl." Even though exhausted by this etymological pursuit, and despite my prejudice against taking on "foreign airs" of tongue, "Imagnostic" keeps singing in my head and escaping my lips in conversation. I'm not sure if this work is titled "I" for "Imagnostic" or "I" as designating first person singular or "I"/Roman Numeral One.
1979, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $20
II
Now that "II" has been completed, one would suppose that the above film "I" is "One"... unless, of course, this film's spoken title is "aye-aye" or even, perhaps, slyly referring to the two "eyes" which made it, as distinct from the singularity of vision which flattened space in the making of its predecessor.
1979, 16mm, color/si, 9m (18fps), $25 16mm III
The third in this series of Imagnostic Films seems particularly magic to me in as much as I cannot even remember the photographic source of these images or, thus, of having taken them.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 2m (18fps), $20
IV
It was while studying this film that I decided to group these "romans" under the title ROMAN NUMERAL SERIES and to give up the term "Imagnostic" altogether. The term "deja vu" comes to mind each time I view this film - this, then, somehow the "echoing" of the birth of imagery.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 2m, (18fps), $20 16mm V
An imagery sharp as stars and hard as the thought-universe (turning back upon itself) absorbed in gentle patterns of contemplation.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 3m (18fps), $20
VI
What shall one say?
1980, 16mm, color/si, 13m (18fps), $30
VII
What CAN one say? - that won't limit by language the complexity of moving visual thinking? ... the skein of pattern that seeks to make its own language.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 5m (18fps), $20
VIII
This is the most formal of all these works.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 4m (18fps), $20 16mm IX
This is the most absolute.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 2m (18fps), $20 16mm The final Duplicity in this series does seem a resolve with the term. All previous visual manifestations have been extended (thru four-roll superimpositions) to their limit. Obvious costumes and masks. Drama as an ultimate play for truth, and totemic recognition of human animal life-on-earth dominate all the evasions duplicity otherwise affords.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 30m (18fps), $90
"Every man's work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." - 1 Corinthians 1-13
1980, 16mm, color/si, 12m, $35
Dedicated to Virgil Grillo.
A film photographed in Amsterdam but dedicated to capturing a quality of mind engendered there - not, certainly, alienation (as often in travel) but rather some heightened sense of being other.
1980, 16mm, color/si (18fps), $20
Portrait of the great chess master, aesthetician, human being, Eugene Salome.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 3m (18fps), $20
This film was originally photographed in 1970 in regular 8mm. It was, a decade later, blown up to 16mm so that it could join the rest of the Sexual Meditation series.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 6m (18fps), $20 16mm This, the sixth film of the SINCERITY/DUPLICITY series, seems rooted in the earliest tradition of my work, Psycho-Drama, as well as in the most recent, Imagnostic, directions taken. It is remembrance as well as thought which fashions it in lonely hotel rooms, sincere return of the mind to that which is loved, ephemeral faces of children growing older, familiar objects interwoven with easy alien familiarity, the images of strangers in UNeasy identification, sexual posture and the lure of the Beloved as irreducible image.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 40m, $120
This, then, finishes eleven years of editing drawing on 30-some years of photography. I will surely work autobiographically again, but the modes of SINCERITY and DUPLICITY seem completed with this film which on the one hand is as simple in its integrity-of-light as those follow-the-ball "sing-along" early silent movies and on the other as complicated as teen-age metamorphosis. Childhood dissolves in flame, struck from the hearth.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 45m, $135
After much technical difficulty and elaborate color RE-creation, I've managed to enlarge the REGULAR 8mm "SONGS 1-14" into 16mm films, which saves them from extinction ... AND permits them a larger public life ... "Go, little naked and impudent songs" ... into the auditoriums of the world and live ... awhile longer.
Portrait of a lady; fire and a mind's movement in remembering; three girls playing with a ball (hand-painted); a childbirth song; the painted veil via moth-death; San Francisco.
1966/1980, 16mm, color/si, 28m (18fps), $85 Sea creatures; wedding source and substance; sitting around; fires, windows, an insect, a lyre of rain scratches; verticals and shadows caught in glass traps; a travel song of scenes and horizontals; molds, paints and crystals.
1966/1980, 16mm, color/si, 30m (18fps), $90 SONG 16 - a flowering of sex as in the mind's eye, a joy; SONGS 17 & 18 - the movie house cathedral and a singular room; SONGS 19 & 20 - women dancing and a light; SONGS 21 & 22 - two views of closed-eye vision.
1966-84, 16mm, color/si, 49m, $135
A naked boy with recorder and a view from the dump. The emotional properties of talk.
Late 1960s, 16mm, color/si, 14.5m (18fps), $45
SONG 28 - scenes as texture; SONG 29 is a portrait of the artist's mother.
1966-1986, 16mm, color/si, 8m (18fps), $25
Note: The SONGS are intended for 18fps, but also are okay for 24fps ... as they were intended for variable-speed 8mm projectors; and therefore these new "blowups" can certainly run at either of those 16mm projector speeds. "after + math (((mowing, crop))) a second growth crop" ... this my strongest attack on pop culture, the movies, TV, etc. - what CAN be done with it? / The idealism of moving-visual-thought-process, the very raw meat of brain, trying to absorb and transform "the unthinkable": this, then, that second harvest of healthier gain ... retrieving patriotism, even, from blasphemous commerce. (Quote Webster's 7 Coll.)
1981, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25.
This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except "0 + 10" going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind's moving-visual-thinking different from that of the ROMAN NUMERAL SERIES ... or perhaps one should say that the ARABIC NUMERALS come to fruition thru some tree-of-nerves separate from that which gave birth to the ROMANS (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in "layers"). The ARABICS range in length from approximately five minutes to 32 minutes and may be projected at 24fps as well as 18, tho' the latter speed seems preferable for starts. I think each film's integrity of rhythm would allow viewing at a greater variety of speeds, were there the 16mm projectors to permit that exercise. So far as I can tell, they defy verbal interpretation (even more than their ROMAN equivalents) and would, thus, seem to be closer to Music than any previous work given me to do; but if that be true, it is (as composer James Tenney put it to me) that they relate to that relatively small area of musical composition which resists Song and Dance and exists more purely in terms of Sound Events in Time/Space. Finally, then, the inspiration of all those modern (and a few ancient) composers I've most loved since my teens overwhelms the easier, and comfortably lovely, habits of jig and do-re-mi AND creates a visual correlative OF music's eventuality - i.e., each ARABIC is formed by the intrinsic grammar of the most inner (perhaps pre-natal) structure of thought itself.
Arabic 1
1980, 16mm, color/si, 5.5m (18fps), $20
Arabic 2
1980, 16mm, color/si, 7m (18fps), $20
Arabic 3
1980, 16mm, color/si, 10.5m (18fps), $30
Arabic 4
1981, 16mm, color/si, 10m (18fps), $30
Arabic 5
1981, 16mm, color/si, 5m (18fps), $20
Arabic 6
1981, 16mm, color/si, 11m (18fps), $30
Arabic 7
1981, 16mm, color/si, 11m (18fps), $30
Arabic 8
1981, 16mm, color/si, 7m (18fps), $20
Arabic 9
1981, 16mm, color/si, 12m (18fps), $35
Arabic 0 + 10
1981, 16mm, color/si, 32m (18fps), $90
Arabic 11
1981, 16mm, color/si, 10.5m (18fps), $30
Arabic 12
1981, 16mm, color/si, 27m (18fps), $80
Arabic 13
1981, 16mm, color/si, 5m, (18fps), $20
Arabic 14
1981, 16mm, color/si, 5.5m (18fps), $20
Arabic 15
1981, 16mm, color/si, 7.5m (18fps), $20
Arabic 16
1981, 16mm, color/si, 8.5m (18fps), $25
Arabic 17
1981, 16mm, color/si, 8m (18fps), $25
Arabic 18
1981, 16mm, color/si, 8.5m (18fps), $25
Arabic 19
1981, 16mm, color/si, 9m (18fps), $25
This film (related to MOTHLIGHT) is a collage composed entirely of montane zone vegetation. As the title suggests it is an homage to (but also argument with) Hieronymous Bosch. It pays tribute as well, and more naturally, to "The Tangled Garden" of J.E.H. MacDonald and the flower paintings of Emil Nolde.
1981, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m (18fps), $20
"... unparalleled debauchery, when man turns into a filthy, cowardly, cruel, vicious reptile. That's what we need! And what's more, a little 'fresh blood' that we may grow accustomed to it ...." (Dostoyevsky's The Devils, Part II, Chapter VIII)
"In my novel The Devils I attempted to depict the complex and heterogenous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in an absolutely monstrous crime." (Dostoyevsky's The Diary of a Writer)
1981, 16mm, color/si, 16m, $45
"nodus knot, node - more at NET) ... 4a: a point at which subsidiary parts originate or center ... 5: a point, line, or surface of a vibrating body that is free or relatively free from vibratory motion." In the tradition of SKEIN this hand-painted film is the equivalent of cathexis concepts given me by Sigmund Freud (in his "Interpretation of Dreams"), 30 years ago, finally realizing itself as vision. (Quote: Web. 7th).
1981, 16mm, color/si, 3m, $20
This film is a mix of landscape images seen from train windows and the patterned shapes and shifting tones of moving-visual-thought thus prompted; it was inspired by Robert Breer's FUJI.
1981, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25
"This film, photographed in London in 1979, finished in January of 1982, is an exploration into the depths of unconscious reactions. Having been in London with Stan when he photographed it, I find this a deeply accurate memory piece. Not 'That's how it looked to me' but 'That's how it felt!' There are many new techniques in this film, new grammar. It is a very rich lode." - Jane Brakhage
While visiting London, England (dream of my youth) and wishing to be simply camera-tourist (taking pics. of exotic architectural arrangements imagined since earliest Dickens, etc.) I found myself forced, yes forced!, to photograph, rather, the nearest equivalent to the NON-pictorial workings of my mind which these London scenes, before my eyes and camera lens, would afford - each scenic possibility distorted from any easily identifiable picture to some laborious reconstruction of the mind's eye at the borders of the unconscious. It was two years before I could even begin to edit; and then some visual-song of all of England's history began to move thru this material, fashioning it in some way akin to that music of Pierre Boulez which is at one with the poetry of Rene Char - this plus the English "round," song and dance ... only (as is true to my thought process then, in England, and now in memory) the rounds are within rounds, round and around, all (as many as seven interspersed thoughts continuing the orders of shots) interwoven.
1982, 16mm, color/si, 22m, $65
A series of meditations on Egyptian hieroglyphs - designations (as I finally saw them) of nurturing godheads.
1983, 16mm, color/si, 17m, $52
Dedicated to Bill and Stella Pence.
My moving-visual response to William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven & Hell," this hand-painted film seems the most rhythmically exact of all my work: it was inspired by memories of an old man coughing in the night of a thin-walled ancient hotel ... a triumph of rhythm thru to inspiration.
1983, 16mm, color/si, 1m, $20
"Why should she give birth, though she had worked in a pottery, to an urn, to a stone angel, to the face of a cracked sundial? Why should she be, she screamed, this common clay, this tortured dust?" - from "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling" by Marguerite Young ... to whom this film is gratefully dedicated.
1984, 16mm, color/si, 90m, $135
Someone said to me, of this film, that it was really about light; but Jane (who takes it as a portrait - i.e., sees herself in it) said: "you gave me the moon and seven stars."
1985, 16mm, color/si, 13m, $40.
Portraits of family and friends, including poets Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Ed Dorn and Robert Kelly as well as sculptor Angelo DiBenedetto and poet/filmmaker Jonas Mekas.
1967-1986, 16mm, color/si, 47m (18fps), $135
I have never been satisfied with the soundtrack on this early work of mine. Thirty years after its initial release, I completed a new track which, after much listening, seems to be not only a great improvement, but a definitive audio/visual combination.
"A brilliant psychodrama on masturbation." - Cinema 16
"The dramatic power of a Greek tragedy." - P. Adams Sitney
1956-1986, 16mm, b&w/so, 25m, $75
At the Art Cinema in Boulder, Colorado, the Sunday Associates staged an adaptation of Jane Brakhage's story of Caesar's invasion of Britain, "Caswallon the Headhunter." I contributed a hand-painted film loop, as part of the special effects, as well as making two films during rehearsals: 1) the first dance film I've made, DANCE SHADOWS BY DANELLE HELANDER and 2) a film which meditates upon the unique process of creativity engendered by Denise Judson and the Sunday Associates in production, THE AERODYNE (Webster: "heavier-than-air aircraft that derives its lift in flight from forces resulting from its motion through air") - the latter two films silent. Thus the CASWALLON TRILOGY is composed of:
THE AERODYNE: Silent
FIRELOOP: Sound by Joel Haertling, Architect's Office
DANCE SHADOWS BY DANIELLE HELANDER: Silent
1986, 16mm, color/si & so, 10m, $30
This film was photographed midst the drama it depicts: As I was the "protagonist" of the drama, it is the most extremely autobiographical documentation given to me to do. As it was made while the brain was thus stunned, I think it was wrongly titled LOVE SACRIFICE. I am now renaming it CONFESSION (in the same spirit which moved me to retitle SINCERITY IV/DUPLICITY I). There is a clear sense that all which the film depicts precludes even the possibilities of Love, so that it represents an even greater sacrifice of all that we know of loving than I had originally thought when I first titled it. Perhaps I, after all a filmmaker, should cease speaking and simply turn to a quote from Petrarch which seems true "addenda" to the film now, as it did when I made it: "Firstly, I revealed in salutary confession the secret filth of my misdeeds, which had long been festering in stagnant silence; and I made it my custom to confess often, and thus to display the wounds of my blinded soul to the almighty Healer" (Epistolae Familiares X, 5, June 11, probably 1352). I suddenly thought the title might best be, simply, CONFESSION; for the Petrarch does hold solid thru all this turmoil. I continue to think there can be no "wrong" form of loving ... BUT, people can become easily confused as to what Love IS.
1986, 16mm, color/si, 27m, $80
Dedicated to Robert Kelly.
A multiple-superimposition hand-painted visual symphony of animal life of earth. THE LOOM might be compared to musical quartet-form (as there are almost always four superimposed pictures); but the complexity of texture, multiplicity of tone, and the variety of interrelated rhythm, suggest symphonic dimensions. The film is very inspired by George Melies: the animals exist (in Jane's enclosure) as on a stage, their interrelationships edited to the disciplines of dance, so therefore one might say this hardly represents "animal life on earth"; but I would argue that this work at least epitomizes theatrical Nature, magical Creature, and is the outside limit, to date, of my art in that respect.
(The balance-of-light was so perfectly realized in making the neg. of this print that I wish to credit Western Cine Lab's "timer" Louise Fujiki as creative collaborator in the accomplishment of this work.)
1986, 16mm, color/si, 50m, $135
This is a "companion piece" to the similarly hand-painted FIRELOOP (of CASWALLON TRILOGY) and is dedicated to the filmmaker Paul Lundahl who supplied the title which prompted the film.
1986, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m, $20
This hand-painted work six years in-the-making (37 in the studying of The Divine Comedy) demonstrates the earthly conditions of "Hell," "Purgatory" (or Transition) and "Heaven" (or "existence is song," which is the closest I'd presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from "Hell" (HELL SPIT FLEXION) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnagogic vision created by those emotional states. Originally painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm and 35mm, these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yanosky of Western Cine.
1987, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $75
A collaboration between composer Rick Corrigan and Stan Brakhage, featuring Joel Haertling as Faust, Gretchen LeMaistre as Gretchen, Phillip Hathaway as Faust's friend, and Paul Lundahl as Servant. This is the realization of a 30-year-old-dream (grant applications and fragments of script >from the 1950s published in Brakhage's Metaphors on Vision), a wish of the young filmmaker to film a "modern" Faust (quite opposite of the traditional Fausts) which finally came to a fulfillment as unpredictable and as absolute as, say, three decades of living experience.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 50m, $135
FAUST PART 2 reveals the modern Faust in a romantic interlude, an idyll (from the Greek idein, "to see"); also, a journey of the id. A sense of story is inferred through the complex interweaving of human gesture, expression, and bodily movement within vibrantly shifting colors and rhythmic development, creating multiple levels of metaphorical meaning. A collaborative work with paintings by Emily Ripley and soundtrack by Joel Haertling.
1988, 16mm, color/so, 45m, $135
Just as the word "Idyll" of Faust's Part 2 is rooted in the Greek "idein" / "to see," so is "Candida" in "candidatus," as used in "the white robed army of martyrs" of the "Te Deum," as well as "Albicare" / "to be white" or "Albicore" out of the Portuguese (of Arabic origin) designating a kind of tunny (or white tuna): thus, Faust's 3 is white / white as well as (from sugar's "white") candy, and fish: it is the modern Walpurgisnacht to Faust, but the daydream of "his" Emily: it exists that a woman have, finally, something of her ritual included in the myth of Faust ... and that "muthos" / "mouth" become a vision.
1988, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $80
This is a setting-to-film of a "collage" of Stephen Foster phrases by composer Joel Haertling. The recurring musical themes and melancholia of Foster refer to "loss of love" in the popular "torch song" mode; but the film envisions a re-awakening of such senses-of-love as children know, and it posits (along a line of words scratched over picture) the psychology of waiting.
1988, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
This film presents the voice of a child play-singing in relation to full orchestral "takes" of The Times and visually juxtaposed with children-at-play (my grandchildren Iona and Quay Bartek) in Americana backyard. They are seen, as in dream, to be already caught-up-in yet absolutely distinct-from the rituals of adulthood. The visuals were photographed and edited TO the music collage of Architect's Office performance A0124 by Trevor and Joel Haertling and Doug Stickler.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20.
(sound version)
Hand-painted (closed eye) film envisioning optic feedback in response to sound. Collaborative soundtrack compiled by Joel Haertling with sound contributions by Die Totliche Doris (WG), Zoviet France (UK), Nurse With Wound (UK), The Hafler Trio (NL), Joel Haertling (US) and I.H.T.S.O. (WG).
1988, 16mm, color/so, 2.5m, $20
This stream-of-visual-consciousness could be nothing less than pathway of the soul, as images of Marilyn's window are remembered from inside-out, its "view" interwoven with all of other windowing and the Elements of the known world.
1988, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
This is one of those "little films" which is pure "cine poem" in the sense that it is picture, but also given over to what we call "abstract" - which is to say it arises as mind's light and exists, as such, as filmic "prayer." (Made on the occasion of, and inspired by, Jim and Lauren Tenney's marriage.)
1988, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m, $20
Music by Rick Corrigan.
This is the imaged thought process of young Faust escaping the unbearable pictures of his broken romantic idyll, mentally fleeing the particulars of his dramatized "love," Faust's mind ranging the geography of his upbringing and its structures of cultural hubris - the whole nervous system "going to ground" and finally "becoming one" with the hypnagogically visible cells of his receptive sight and inner cognition ... all that I could give him of Heaven in this current visualization of these ancient themes.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 36m, $110
This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein's "Stanzas In Meditation," in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes and human symbolism "indicative of that field-of-consciousness within which humanity survives thoughtfully." It is a film "as in a dream," this first film in a proposed series of such being composed of images shot in the New England states and Eastern Canada. It begins with an antique photograph of a baby and ends with a child loose on the landscape, interweaving images of Niagara Falls with a variety of New England and Eastern Canadian scenes, antique photographs, windows, old farms and cityscapes, as it moves from deep winter, through glare ice, to thaw.
1989, 16mm, color/si, 20m, $60
This meditation takes its visual imperatives from the occasion of Mesa Verde, which I came to see finally as a Time rather than any such solidity as Place. "There is a terror here," were the first words which came to mind on seeing these ruins; and for two days after, during all my photography, I was haunted by some unknown occurrence which reverberated still in these rocks and rock-structures and environs. I can no longer believe that the Indians abandoned this solid habitation because of drought, lack-of-water, somesuch. (These explanations do not, anyway, account for the fact that all memory of The Place, i.e., where it is, was eradicated from tribal memory, leaving only legend of a Time when such a place existed.) Midst the rhythms, then, of editing, I was compelled to introduce images which corroborate what the rocks said, and what the film strips seemed to say: The abandonment of Mesa Verde was an eventuality (rather than an event), was for All Time thus, and had been intrinsic from the first such human building.
1989, 16mm, color/si, 17m, $50
After a six or seven year study of Hammurabi's Code, original Babylonian Text and translation, I've tried to feel my way into the moving visual thought process of this ancient culture (whose numerical system is composed primarily of building materials, nails, joints and the like): this, then, is a visual music which balances the two thought processes of Structure and Nature.
1989, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $20
Out of the vagueries of sometime beseeming repetitive light patterns, and the delicately variable rhythms of thought process, the imagination of The Monumental and of the Ephemeral are born to mind hard as nails.
1990, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
There is an architectured garden of the variably brash rock-solid liquid-encompassing, but always imitative, human mind as it processes the given light thoughtfully. This film is about that.
1990, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $20
This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak - a memory piece, a "piecing together" of the experience of living there. The consciousness of the maker comes to sharply focussed visual music - not to arrive at snapshots, somesuch, but rather to "sing" The City as re-membered from daily living ... complementary, then, to an earlier film, UNCONSCIOUS LONDON STRATA.
1990, 16mm, color/si, 25m, $75
When I received the tape of Philip Corner's Through the Mysterious Barricade, Lumen 1 (after F. Couperin), he included a note that thanked me for my film, THE RIDDLE OF LUMEN, he'd just seen and which had in some way inspired this music. I, in turn, was so moved by the tape he sent I immediately asked his permission to "set it to film."
It required the most exacting editing process ever; and in the course of that work it occurred to me that I'd originally made THE RIDDLE OF LUMEN hoping someone would make an "answering" film and entertain my visual riddle in the manner of the riddling poets of yore. I most expected Hollis Frampton (because of Zorn's Lemma) to pick up the challenge; but he never did. In some sense I think composer Corner has - and now we have this dance of riddles as music and film combine to make "passage," in every sense of the word, further possible. (To be absolutely "true to" the ritual of this passage, the two reels of the film should be shown on one projector, taking the normal amount of time, without rewinding reel #1 or showing the finish and start leaders of either - especially without changing the sound dials - between reels.)
1990, 16mm, color/so, 50m, $135
As a poem might be said to contain the night through a weave of words, so have I in this film attempted such a container with warp and woof of emblematic visions.
(Homage to Marie Menken's "Notebooks.")
1990, 16mm, color/si, 10m, $30
. Three Hand-painted Films:
Nightmusic
This little film (originally painted on IMAX) attempts to capture the beauty of sadness, as the eyes have it when closed in meditation on sorrow. "A work of hand-painted 'moving visual thinking'; colors and forms coursing, flowing, bursting, as if of fire and water - of the earth, of the body, of the mind." - M.B.
1986, 16mm, color/si, 30sec
Rage Net
Much of what has been said about the above film could be repeated here, except that RAGE NET arises from meditation upon, rather than being trapped psychologically by, rage.
1988, 16mm, color/si, 30sec
Glaze of Cathexis
This hand-painted work is easily the most minutely detailed ever given to me to do, for it traces (as best I'm able) the hypnagogic after-effect of psychological cathexis as designated by Freud in his first (and unfinished) book on the subject - Toward a Scientific Psychology.
1990, 16mm, color/si, 3m
Plato's cave would seem to be the idee fixe of this film. The vortex would, then, be the phenomenological world - overwhelming, and thus "uninhabitable." The structures of thoughtful meditation are naturally, therefore, equivocal so that, for example, even a tornado-in-the-making will be both "dust devil" and "finger of God" at one with the clockwork sun and the strands of ice/fire, horizon, rock, clouds, so on.
The film is, I believe, a vision of mentality as most people must (to the irritation of Plato) have it, safely encaved and metaphorical, for the nervous system to survive. All the same I hope, with this work, to have brought a little "rush light" into the darkness. The film is set to the three movements of Rick Corrigan's "Memory Suite." Its multiple superimpositions are superbly timed by Louise Fujiki, of Western Cine, as usual.
1990, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $45
I've made three pilgrimages in my life: the 40-some-year home of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Emily Dickinson's in Amherst, and the mountain ranch and crypt, would you call it?, of D.H. Lawrence, outside Taos. I keep returning to the Lawrence environs again and again; and this last time attempted photography in that narrow little building where his ashes were (or were not) deposited (contradictory stories about that). There is a child-like sculpture of The Phoenix at the far end of the room, a perfectly lovely emblem to deflate any pomposity people have added to Lawrence's "I rise in flames ...." The building is open, contains only a straw chair (remindful of the one Van Gogh painted) and a broom, which I always use with delight to sweep the dust and leaves from this simple abode. I have tried to make a film as true to the spirit of Lawrence as is this gentle chapel in homage of him. I have attempted to leave each image within the film free to be itself and only obliquely in the service of Lawrence's memory. I have wanted to make it a film within which that child-Phoenix can reasonably nest.
(Bruce Elder sends me this quote from D.H. Lawrence, which may help to explain why VISIONS IN MEDITATION #4 is subtitled in his name: "... there must be mutation swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without denouncement or close." - "Poetry of the Present," intro to the American edition of New Poems, 1918)
1990, 16mm, color/si, 19m, $55
To the child mind, the transformative sacrificial power of "O, Lamb of God" is a daily manifestation - not as an adult shift-of-interest, but rather as ritual magic in which a toy train ("-of-thought," an adult might say) becomes medium of shifts-of-scene, soforth, wherein an elephantine shape transforms to a more "real" (i.e., less metaphorical) train, in sacrifice of transformative elephant, so on-&-on. An earlier film, THE MACHINE OF EDEN, is of some similar construct (as is a good deal of western painting) in its insistence upon contemporary mise-en-scene as grounds for Biblical lore.
1991, 16mm, color/si, 4.5m, $20
In poet Ronald Johnson's great epic Ark, in the first book Foundations, the poem "Beam 29" has this passage: "The seed is disseminated at the gated mosaic a hundred feet / below, above / long windrows of motion / connecting dilated arches undergoing transamplification: / 'seen in the water so clear as christiall' / (prairie tremblante)" which breaks into musical notation that, "presto," becomes a design of spatial tilts: This is where the film began; and I carried a xerox of the still unpublished ARC 50 through 66 all that trip with Marilyn and Anton around Vancouver Island. As I wrote him, "The pun 'out on a limn' kept ringing through my mind as I caught the hairs of side-light off ephemera of objects tangent to Marilyn's childhood: She grew up in Victoria; and there I was in her childhood backyard ...": and then there was The Sea - not as counter-balance but as hidden generator of it all, of the The World to be discovered by the/any child ... as poet Charles Olson has it: "Vast earth rejoices, / deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things, / everything issues from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness / to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead, / the man awake lights up from the sleeping." (Maximus, from "Dogtown - I")
1991, 16mm, color/si, 80m, $135
This work, composed of six rolls of superimposed images set to Jim Tenney's electronic music track "Blue Suede," is a celebration of the balletic restraints of adolescent sexuality-shaped (in this instance) by "The Nutcracker Suite" of Tchaikovsky as well as the gristly roots of Elvis Presley.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 5.5m, $24
The primary "Molten Horror" is TV - though there are other horrors metaphored in the film. Four superimposed rolls of hand-painted and bi-packed television negative imagery are edited so as to approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions of luminescent light.
1991, 16mm, color/si, 10m, $40
"Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe." - D.H. Lawrence
This little film, like a fire in the mind, seeks that "tree" along a line of metaphorical synapse.
1991, 16mm, color/si, $20
Music by Rick Corrigan.
Peripheral envisionment of daily life as the mind has it - i.e., a terrifying ecstasy of (hand-painted) synapting nerve ends back-firing from thought's grip of life.
1992, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60 Music by Rick Corrigan.
A nostalgic envisionment of city living - the potential shards of memory seen as if always on the verge of cutting the mind to pieces ... "Nostalgia is the most dangerous thought process" - poet Charles Olson, mid '60s
1992, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20 An untitled hand-painted film - a hypnagogic four-part thought process interwoven with scratched words in thanks to and praise of God.
1992, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $30 Dedicated to Doug Edwards.
All titles dominate linguistically; in that sense, any film would be better left unnamed. This little hand-painted work attempts to BE a visual "flowering," and as it is (as Film is) a continuity art, it would seek some visual corollary of the whole growth process (root, stem, leaves, blue sky and the bloody-gold growth of the meat/mind electricity of the filmmaker) - but without mimic of either flower or thought process ... clear through to Film's clear "blossoming" in the passage of light.
1993, 16mm, color/si, 30sec, $20 This is a film composed of two elements: 1) simple hand-painted frames and brief strips of hand-painting, and 2) strips of blank colors, which appear as overall hues or color tones filtering light itself rather than any pictured scenes. These two elements are interposed in editing so as to suggest the seasonal changes of tree-leaf (from greens to golds, reds and browns) and the sky (from varieties of warm-to-cold blues).
1993, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20 This is one of the most elaborately edited of all the hand-painted films of late - a Haydenesque complexity of thematic variations on a totally visual (i.e., un-musical) theme.
This film is composed of 35mm hand-painted images reduced to 16mm film, single-frames, shots of two, three, four frames and, occasionally, slightly longer shots, all interspersed with a variety of calculated lengths of black leader which cause a flickering of abstract patterns in rhythmed darkness.
1993, 16mm, color/si, 4.5m, $25 A hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to create varieties of tempo in mimic of sparking and molten rock. The recurrent centrality of certain painted forms, and the exploding magma-like flickering repetitions of all that surrounds the forms, suggests a harrowing process.
1993, 16mm, color/si, 3m, must be rented with TRYST HAUNT This is a hand-painted film photographically step-printed so that the thicket-like lines of paint are "played off" against some centered pale-hued areas of paint in such a way as to suggest a clearing in a forest of branches (which is, in the repetitive form of the whole film, only fleetingly seen) - a trysting place which flits through the mind like a ghost.
1993, 16mm, color/si, 3m, must be rented with THE HARROWING
Note: THE HARROWING and TRYST HAUNT are available as a package at the price of $20. This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes partial use of painted frames in repetition (for "close-up" of textures). The tone of the film is primarily dark blue, and the paint is composed (and rephotographed microscopically) to suggest galactic forms in a space of stars.
1993, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m, $20 The title is almost the whole of any possible description of this hand-painted and photographically step-printed film, which exhibits variably shaped small areas of color (in a dark field) that explode into full frames of textured color interwoven with white scratch patterns that create a considerable sense of interior depth and three-dimensional movement.
1993, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m, $20 This film is composed of three sections created to accompany a piece of music (by Barbara Feldman) on a Homeric poem: 1) "Diana holds back the night ..." is represented by dark shapes suppressing (almost angularly interfering with) orange-golden effusions of paint and the reflective paint-shapes of early morning greens (as if silhouettes or arm and bodily profile were shading the light), 2) Homer's "... rolling sea ..." represented by hand-painted step-printed dissolves of blues in wave shapes, bubbles, and the soft browns and tender greens of seaweed, flotsam-jetsam, and 3) "Ah, love again, the light" represented by painted explosions of multiple hues and lines recurrently interrupted by the "blush" of soft suffusing reds.
1993, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $20 I lost sight due a blow on the head from slipping on black ice (leading to eye surgery, eventually); and now (because of artificially thinned blood) most steps I take outdoors all winter are made in frightful awareness of black ice.
These "meditations" have finally produced this hand-painted, step-printed film.
1994, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m, $20
The hand-painting of this film is interrupted by, and interspersed with, a geometrically structured Mask of Death (one of those frightening human idea-shapes of dying) immediately caught-up in threads of streaming, polarized crystals of Light (elaborately step-printed, with simultaneous frame-to-frame dissolves and printer "pull-backs" creating an effect as if the room in which the film is being viewed was inhaling viscous strands of Life's chemical material). The blurred photo-image of a person appears briefly superimposed on these "streamings": then there is a short visual "exhale" of this "crystallized" light, as the screen appears to re-absorb its imagery and resolve itself into a pale violet scattering of dust, is it? ... a nebulae, perhaps - i.e., some semblance both earthly and cosmic and (as such) as enigmatic as "the face of God." Collaboration with Sam Bush.
1994, 16mm color/si, 2m, $20 In this non-orange negative of a hand-painted film, a series of luminously pastel shapes - often patches of color against a stark white background - are interspersed with nearly black intermittent smudges punctuating white. These visual themes develop gradually into a series of multi-colored vertical lines which weave contrapunctally in relation to the flickering (single-frame) paint shapes. Twice, a solid (as if photographed) shape is seen receding from the amalgam of paint. Masses of tiny dots and "curlicue" shapes sometimes interrupt the thematic progression from irregular paint-shape flickerings to fluidity of vertical lines: this theme eventually resolves itself through the intervention of globular shapes (most notably, brilliant orange-yellow "globs") which spread themselves over several frames and prompt the eventual amalgamation of all themes.
1994, 16mm, color/si, 10m, $30 A year and a half ago the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted I must see the Chartres Cathedral. I, who had studied picture books of its great stained-glass windows, sculpture and architecture for years, having also read Henry Adams' great book three times, willingly complied and had an experience of several hours (in the discreet company of French filmmaker Jean-Michele Bouhours) which surely transformed my aesthetics more than any other single experience. Then Marilyn's sister died; and I, who could not attend the funeral, sat down alone and began painting on film one day, this death in mind ... Chartres in mind. Eight months later the painting was completed on four little films which comprise a suite in homage to Chartres and dedicated to Wendy Jull.
(My thanks to Sam Bush, of Western Cine, who collaborated with me on this, much as if I were a composer who handed him a painted score, so to speak, and a few instructions - a medieval manuscript, one might say - and he were the musician who played it.)
1994, 16mm, color/si, 9m, $30 This a hand-painted film whose emotionally referential shapes and colors are interwoven with words (in English) from the first Hymn to the Night by the late 18th century mystic poet Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, whose pen name was Novalis. The pieces of text which I've used are as follows: "the universally gladdening light ... As inmost soul ... it is breathed by stars ... by stone ... by suckling plant ... multiform beast ... and by (you). I turn aside to Holy Night ... I seek to blend with ashes. Night opens in us ... infinite eyes ... blessed love."
1994, 16mm, color/si, 3m, $20
The film begins with a series of horizontally running ocean tide waves, sometimes with mountains in the background, hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painting, abstractions composed of distorted (jammed) TV shapes in shades of blue with occasional red, refractions of light within the camera lens, sometimes mixed with reflections of water - this "weave" of imagery occasionally revealing recognizable shapes of birds and humans, humans as fleeting figures in the water, as distant shapes in a rowboat, as human shadows, so forth. Increasingly closer images of water, and of light reflected off water, as well as of bursts of fire, intersperse the long shots, the seascapes and all the other interwoven imagery. Eventually a distant volleyball arcs across the sky filled with cumulus clouds: this is closely followed by, and interspersed with, silhouettes of a young man and woman in the sea, which leads to some extremely out-of-focus images from a front car window, an opening between soft-focus trees, a clearing. Carved wooden teeth suddenly sweep across the frame. Then the film ends on some soft-focus horizon lines, foregrounded by ocean, slowly rising and falling and rising again in the frame.
This film is a companion piece to A CHILD'S GARDEN and THE SERIOUS SEA.
1994, 16mm, color/si, 30m, $90 A series of five hand-painted, step-printed films, each of which is a textured, thus tangible, "nothing." A series of "nots," then, in pun, or knots of otherwise invisible energies. 1) The first begins with a semblance of fog clouds rising vertically, an upward lifting waterfall likeness which screens an ephemera of painted shapes that come, at end, to a rhythmic and formal hardness. 2) A progression of blue surreal shapes vanishing in forward movements. 3) A gathering of crystalline forms in primary colors emitting upward-moving flares of multicolored lights, all gradually suggesting an outward momentum. 4) An orange rock-beseeming wall of lights and upward flares suddenly frozen and fading. 5) A mixture of crystal and cellular shapes interacting like layers of a fire of decomposition, fogged, and finally like a palimpsest of melding illuminations.
1994, 16mm, color/si, 5.5m, $20 Dedicated to Phil Solomon.
I Take These Truths
This film is entirely hand-painted and is composed of such an evolution of variably colored shapes that their inter-action with each other should constitute a purely visual "self-evident" (as prompted by the title): everything beyond the title is as far removed from language as I could possibly make it; and thus it is, to me, practically impossible to describe. Each frame is printed twice, so that its effective speed (at 24fps) is 12 frames per second. A variety of organic and crystalline painted shapes (painted on clear leader, thus as if brilliantly back-lit in a blazing space of light) are interspersed with very dark (black leader) passages as if etched with scratches of light and stained radiances: the juxtaposition of these two contrasting qualities of painted and scraped film are "interwoven," sometimes with vine, or vein-like irregular lines in black or alternatively, scratch-etched white. There are also some straight, multi-colored, bars which move, diagonally from one side of the film frame to the other. All these "themes" finally give way to clear thick gelatinous effects which resolve themselves in a long passage of beseemingly-struggling hieroglyphic white shapes in a black field, ending on a brief spate of variable coloration.
1994, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $105 The "Truths" of this film, which the title prompts, are slightly recognizable patterns of fish and animal biology, plant and flower shapes, and human anatomy which are interwoven with pastel cubes and other geometries - pastels as if "hung" in a white light interwoven with straight and diagonally bent black lines, eventually clear architectural forms. The recognizable patterns are literally etched on black leader (primarily) and interspersed with very organic painted forms on white. There is often an intended sense of hair and mucous membrane amidst these forms and interwoven with the electric "x-ray" sense of bones. The interplay between black-and-white sections and multi-colored sections increases until there is some sense of merging the two toward the end.
1994, 16mm, color/si, 12m, $40 "Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind." - William James, The Principles of Psychology This is a hand-painted double-step-printed film (i.e., each frame repeated once) which begins with some ephemeral forms and pale tones reminiscent of the "blues" of frothing ocean breakers, the dun "yellows" of the beach, and a complexity of fleeting inter-mixed various other colors and lines suggestive of a variety of vegetable and animal life such as might appear within a sea scape.
The black lines gradually become hieroglyphic and then thicken (whenever they appear) across the length of the film - becoming more and more globular in their vertical inter-weave with increasingly brilliant and then darkened colors. Sometimes there is a beseeming thicket of multiply colored shapes, sometimes a complexity more akin to animal cellular internal systems, and then, again, pale washes of tone remindful of the film's beginning.
Finally the vertically moving globs and coils of glyph begin to thin, break up into broken lines interspersed with pointillistic imagery and horizontal washes of tone, punctuated by beseeming rock-hard (usually centered) shapes like brilliantly colored, but battered, flecks of form. Then the "washes" are interrupted by spaces of pure white which come, finally, to a whitened end.
1995, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $105 This film is a series of five little hand-painted and elaborately step-printed sections which are individually titled but so inter-related I've decided they should always be shown in this order together, but each such a distinction of the essentially un-nameable subject matter they variously facet that they should retain the character of individual pieces within their shared context ... a context I've attempted to represent by a small "b" for my name "Brakhage."
The film begins with Old Testament, a two-and-a-half minute historical section titled RETROSPECT: THE PASSOVER and its evolution of forms is meant to suggest the Biblical story from which the Jewish religious rituals evolve - an essentially blue-green phosphoressence of forms finally in flight through, yes, parted seas of paint and "armies of the night," as one might put it.
BLUE BLACK: INTROSPECTION is, then, the painted meditation upon the previous section - its forms rhythmically interspersed with some stately pauses of solid thoughtful darkness, like jewels of idea embedded in black velvet. It is about two minutes in length. It begins with suggestions of "landscape."
The three-and-a-half minute BLOOD DRAMA section pulses with red, involves glyphic stitches of red amidst its phosphors of blue-greens, all forms tending to take thought-forms of the previous section through to recognition of internal body, the bloody meat of being human.
The fourth section I AM AFRAID: AND THIS IS MY FEAR is a direct reaction to the third section. The "spark" of a "sky-scape" leads to the subsequent evolution of the same forms in "mental flight," as it were. It is approximately three minutes.
The fifth section is dedicated to Gregory Markopoulos.
The fifth, and final section is the culmination of all previous visuals, the (by now) very recognizable forms of the original story, of inward speculation on narrative, of the disruption in a sense of a spill, or spell, of blood, the non-narrative thought-flight from all this, now (in Finale) becomes an almost unbearable complexity of forms taking on a beseeming "weight" or thickening of those inter-woven shapes. It is an appropriately titled three minute section called SORROWING.
This work was complexly printed off strips of film which were primarily painted in order to achieve negative color.
1995, 16mm, color/si, 15m, $55 This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with several seconds of blank white (interrupted by red and brief electric yellow) and then proceeds to multiply flecked earth and rock shapes and root-like forms which seem to suck horizontally inward and upward midst phosphorescent greens and blues increasingly flecked with light-yellows giving way to tree-top branch likenesses taking oblique shape against a phosphor sky.
1995, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m, $20 Since the age of 17/18, I've been haunted by the catastrophe of Pompeii - beginning with photographs (sold as pornography in high school) of the mummified lovers caught in coitus and preserved by the volcanic ash, revivified by many ghostly photographic books, but especially illuminated by Donald Sutherland's accounts and images from first hand experience of the ruins. Finally my homage in three parts: "The Flowers of Pompeii," "Ashen Snow," and "Angelus."
1995, 16mm, color/si, 5m (18 fps), $30 They are travelogues in photographic fact and in the mind. Unable to afford printing them, I had stuck them in a drawer. The first was made in 1991, the second through sixth in 1992, seven and eight in '93, and the ninth in '92.
1) A travelogue "nocturne" on the city of London as illuminated by "glaze" finally off the surfaces of Turner's paintings.
2) A travelogue to the north of Finland shepherded by the midnight sun.
3) A hand-painted work, a "midsummer's night dream," still reflective of the experience of the previous summer in Finland.
4) A multiply pastel toned balloon of optical fog triumphing over the barest hints of photographic representation in the lower right hand corner.
5) A mountain meditation primarily in blue "mountains" of the mind shaped by amorphous dull yellows and faded violets.
6) A hand-painted film - some of the same colors of the previous films moving through the sandbars and oceans of thoughtful recollection.
7) This is the eternally ephemeral process of attempts to remember imagery "giving way"/being-displaced-by the contemporaneously practical sighting of what confronts any given viewer at every shift of open eyes (or, as in the film, at every shift of camera, optical focus and montage of edit) - the skeins of The Atlantic, the particularities of Boston night lights, and illuminated points West ending on a garbage truck in a parking lot by the deserts of New Mexico.
8) A dark "sea chante" of absolute photography.
9) The color negative of "truth" - that is to say it is the whole truth (insofar as hand-painted film might aspire to achieve it) and a counterbalance epiphany to any such "truth" as might be put in quotes.
1995, 16mm, color/si, 45m (24fps), $135 This film is an elaborately hand-painted step-printed work composed primarily of luminescent greens and blues in constantly shifting symmetrical shapes which suggest, rather than delineate, passage through a corridor. An increasingly menacing evolution of patterns is finally interrupted by a series of static shapes which almost appear to be symbols of resolution, ending on an almost-thigh-bone image.
1995, 16mm, color/si, 3m (24fps), $20 This is a hand-painted, step-printed (with a variety of effects) film which begins with rock-like earth-toned shapes in darkness, followed by increasingly lighter pastel-colored mini-boulder forms to the right and left of the frame mimicking a whitish vertical tunneling (giving the illusion the viewer is moving upward, finally). Then there are garishly colored crystals (primarily green and red) seeming to "bloom" (as if minerals were crystallizing into flowers). Suddenly it is as if tubular phosphoressences (mostly purple, blue and green) are undulating in a dark field. Flashes of white and rhythmic blanks of pastel colors punctuate these transformations which soon become plant-like - beseeming stalks of marsh grass under water, interrupted by whirling garish crystal flowers. Several times, in these passages, the film goes to these blanks of pastel tones. Finally the film ends on a series of these blank tones shifting among blues and blue-greens exploding into white.
(Note: I am the sole author of this film: Sam Bush of Western Cine Service, Denver, is a paid employee; and I've added the credit, at end, simply to fairly praise his workmanship.)
1995, 16mm, color/si, 8.5m (24fps), $30 PRELUDES 1-6 is comprised of six hand-painted and double-frame printed sections of 16mm film:
1) Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are inter-spersed with variously toned circular "water-marks" of blotched paint giving-way to multi-colored brush strokes and finally fulsomely darkened and thickened brush-strokes which then thin to something akin to the beginning.
2) Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes which gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues.
3) Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst "clouds" of color, finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them.
4) Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be super-imposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their "weave" with each other which is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears of color.
5) This section is very similar to #4 except that it is composed of extremely thin-lined colors and sharply delineated shapes which are constantly interrupted by "cloud"-like forms.
6) Interplay of mostly horizontal linears inter-woven with "watermark" forms in a wide variety of tones which gradually tend to dissolve into blues at end.
1996, 16mm, color/si, 11m (24fps), $35 This is a collection of six hand-painted sections interspersed by black leader ... which has been and will ONLY be shown in this form under this title.
The first is what I call "plein-aire abstract" inasmuch as I am, while making the film, observing specific surroundings (primarily Vancouver Island, mostly in the city of Victoria) but am painting the reactions of my internal optic system affected by external scenes, only occasionally (and obliquely) identifiable. The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as "pictures" (there is even a mirror image of a neon bar sign which persists for a few frames twice) but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by, say, the colors of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ordinarily by the cellular shifts and shapes of the optic system receiving exterior imagery.
The second is as removed as possible from any recognition of either exterior scene of interior feedback phenomena. It is, in its ineffability, as close to pure visual music as I can make it, more inspired by The Preludes of Bach or The Preludium of Buxtehuda than anything of my surroundings when I was painting.
The third, again, is "plein-aire abstraction" as defined above (painted in New York City) - with, for example, even a correctly toned green impression of The Statue of Liberty - and, then, impressions of Toronto with its architectural particularities appearing, midst hurrying people - shapes (almost as if photographed at times). This segment is Double-Printed (i.e., two frames for every painted one).
The fourth is also Double-Printed and, as such, is an extreme mixture of 1) darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and 2) very white bursts of light and fleeting colored forms. This is a purely interior vision and as unlike anything describable as I could possibly make it.
Double-printing and plein-aire also is the fifth section: herein thick weaves of multicolored lines and dull-colored blobs play off against each other.
The sixth, and last section is almost a bursting of mostly golden light forms as if heralding sunlight itself in their hurried (single-frame) display.
1996, 16mm, color/si, approx. 14m (24fps), $55 This is a collection of singly- and doubly-printed/(two frames for each one) hand-painted work in six parts:
1) Singly-printed multi-colored watery "blobs" and "feathery" streaks of painted color, dominated by yellows and reds interweaving in complexity until there's an evolution of hard-edge autumn leaf patterns which dissipate into patterns similar to the beginning of the film.
2) This begins in deep brilliant red which darkens into deeper reds and lavender shapes, disrupted by a variety of colors settling into browns and grays and shapes most rock-like, all of which is then shot-thru with sufficient yellow to break up all hard-edge form and give a molten aspect to the mixtures of shapes. This is double-printed.
3) Doubly-printed striations of "brush-strokes" through multicolored "rock" forms dissolving then to blackened "mud" eliciting increasing sense of being under earth.
4) Singly-printed criss-crosses of molten "brush"-(hard-edge)-strokes of black over pebbled yellow, ending finally on an inter-mix of all intertwined forms with increasing lightness/whiteness.
5) Double-printed thinnest possible lines and multiple dots of pale color interwoven with sweeps of linear tones in swiftly transversing motion, all deepening from this almost white field of flitting activity to some solidification of forms.
6) Singly-printed evolution from a deep blue-blackness of hard-edge twisting and sweeping bars and deep black swirls of dry-cracked and electrically "webbed" blotches, giving way to mixtures of bright blue and deep black sweeps of almost hieroglyphic forms midst swirls of multiple colors played against fleeting blacks evolving into multiple shapes in contrastingly brilliant whites.
1996, 16mm, color/si, approx. 11m (24fps), $45 PRELUDE 19 begins with hand-painted swatches of variable colors encompassed eventually by vertical strokes of reds and blues, followed by sudden clearings which are counterpointed by sections of multiple blobs of color, these effects alternating again and again to then become contrasted with pale washes of color deepening to end on blacks.
PRELUDE 20 begins with pale washes of hand-painted tones overlaid eventually by sharp forms, a kind of sliced color becoming more and more smeared.
The first two PRELUDES of this series were double printed, so that PRELUDE 21 is most characterized by the double-time of single-frame printing of extremely thick swatches of multiple colors as if in a furiously boiling cauldron.
PRELUDE 22 is a singly-printed hand-painted thick black and gold swatches of color which evolve into forms that are horizontally and vertically sliced, smeared, cut-off until color "runs" sensuously in snake-like shapes, coils, soforth.
PRELUDE 23 is doubly-printed hand-painted frames causing an effect almost as if wisps of tone were tinting the film intercut with sharp thin lines which "fatten," then, into thick crowded layers of paint, senses of great visual depth. This PRELUDE is almost a catalogue of the effects in all previous PRELUDES.
PRELUDE 24 returns to the tempo of single-frame printing. Its shapes and forms are composed of nearly black torques of ink, flickering with white and only faintly, now and again, tinged with color.
1996, 16mm, color/si, 9m (24fps), $35 BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black "brushstrokes" and hard-edge straight black and white lines.
Finally there is a brilliant pinkish flare veined with curled blue lines which engenders a resolution between these (above described) alternating modes - colors in the straight-line sections, lines among the artifice of "flowers," a kind of dark lattice-form which knits the two modes, gray and colored "clouds" which correlate them.
(Note: the credit to Sam Bush, Western Cine, is simply an homage to his creative craftsmanship. He is a paid employee of Western Cine, Denver, Colorado, who was hired for this job: he is in no sense a collaborator on this work.)
1996, 16mm, color/si, 2.25m (24fps), $20
This is a hand-painted step-printed film which begins with slow dissolves of what appear to be decaying leaves, crumpled browns and golds and oranges which assume qualities of earth and rock shot-through with flashes of crystalline prism colors and jagged scratch marks amidst glows of multiple coloration with increasing blues, varieties of tones of blue, from turquoise to near-purple - these variations of tone (and shape, as well) gradually convey, given the comparatively few appearances of blue, a formal domination over all other tones (and attendant shapes) of the spectrum of the film.
1996, 16mm, color/si, 2.25m (24fps), $20 A hand-painted double-frame printed film which begins with textures reminiscent of a gray shag rug that is fretted by green and golden flashes-of-shape deepening into darker solid purples and even black solidities at brief intervals: this evolves into black hair-like lines which curl and trace circularities midst all earlier textures, forms and colors until, finally, tanned flesh and blood tones predominate. Suddenly a sweep of thin black verticals generate a recapitulation of the beginning which, then, ends on a glob of black.
1996, 16mm, color/si, 2.25m (24fps), $20 A hand-painted elaborately step-printed film which begins in blues and greens with golden geographic-beseeming continents which evolve into symmetricals and dark passages (including a whirling tunnel) whitening to create many bas-relief (photographic solarization) fragments of these previous forms that then flicker vibrantly in a field of ever whitening light.
1996, 16mm, color/si, approx. 2.5m, $20 This hand-painted step-printed film begins with "explosions" of white, yellow, orange (deepening into reds), vermillion, and darker red flame shapes. Then there are anatomical beseeming solid yellows against flickering reds. Multiple dissolves of all previous forms and flickering shapes interspersed with blacks and replaced by "dolly in" movements (of the same) interspersed with white, then increasingly with lengthening blacks which finally gives way to a single vermillion/purple burst of flowery form.
1996, 16mm, color/si, approx. 2.5m (24fps), $20 This little hand-painted film was over-a-year in the making, and absolutely dependent upon a quality of "broad-stroke" in the painting which I think only children really capable of achieving, at least insofar as such stroke can approximate flame. These strokes/flames had, then, to be chopped back to the frame, in order to exist meaningfully on film. They had to be so timed as to epitomize the relentlessness of fire, so toned that fiery ice would be included in the aesthetic. (Thanks to Anton and Vaughn Brakhage)
1996, 16mm, color/si, approx. 4m (24fps), $30 A thin oval of green-tinged light in thick darkness persists, then gradually descends below the bottom of the frame and, after a pause, rises again to its original position. Out of the surrounding darkness a figure slowly emerges, a woman in a purple robe who moves with stately steps back and forth across the screen, finally fully apparent in the "line" (or circle) of light. She throws off her robe and appears in her white shift, lies prone upon the floor, then rises into a dance of rhythmned postures which subside to a kneeling and bound-down position from which she retrieves her robe, enrobes herself again, circles the "pool" of light and is obliterated by four yellow flashes of light (simultaneously, at the four corners of the frame). Out of the darkness there appears the close-up of the upper face and fixed eyes of a young man (Charles Boultenhouse) whose unblinking gaze is intercut with the figure of the torso, head and arms of a male dancer with whitened ringlets of hair superimposed with right-to-left leaps of his legs and by up-reaching fingers which surround the dancer, finally, and mimic his own hand gestures. This is interrupted by flashes of a golden face-mask which obliterates the dancer and is swiftly intercut with a purple circle surrounded by red which ends the film.
(This material was found in boxes of unfinished film projects which Charles Boultenhouse [and presumably Parker Tyler] worked with in the 1950s-1960s. Anna Duncan, one of the "Isadorables" adopted [as well as trained in childhood] by Isadora Duncan was discovered working with Charles in Brentano's bookstore: he felt compelled to preserve this lineage of Duncan, perhaps the greatest dancer innovator of the 20th century - certainly the most famous. While the film was never finished, certainly this section, as well as the following self-portraiture, speaks for itself.)
1996, 16mm, color/si, 7m (24fps), $35 Flares of color break into streams of light, leaves, wood grain and prism-etched vegetation.
A moon lifts out of this dark weave to be replaced by autumn leaves against a grainy sky, a fiery sky.
The moon, again, caught in clouds. The movements, moonlit, of a cat. Vegetation and toned flares (a kind of "ghost light" midst microscopic photography of leaves and twigs).
A gray cat licks itself, its name-tag reflected in lens refractions midst microscopic visions of ice and snow, autumn leaves, green leaves, a distant snow-laden green scene.
A black cat sits quickly down on a green lawn. A night of shards of forms in darkness passes into a day again ... again an octagonal light shape "echoing" the cat's name-tag midst, now, colored leaves in extreme close-up and at some distance mixed with sun. Again a "night" of showering dark, a "dawn" of pinks and yellows of plant growth in close-up.
A kind of gentle yellow "high noon" prevails into which the orange worm appears and reappears, twisting, arching, turning. A phosphorescent orange of leaves explodes midst greens and black holes appropriate to the image of the worm.
Flares of suns, imprismed midst yellows and greens and vibrant sky blues ... always the forms of many varieties of leafage mix with a veritable rain or clash of overall tones, a fire of forms, a glowing color photo-negative of worm, and the final canopies of autumn tone and sky tone permeated by sun, sun streaks and octagonal prism shapes ad infinitum.
1997, 16mm, color/si, 18m (24fps), $55 This "return to photography" (after several years of only painting film) was made on the eve of cancer surgery - a kind of "last testament," if you will ... an envisionment of the fleeting complexity of worldly phenomenon.
1997, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20 This, painted in the hospital while recovering from cancer surgery in 1996, is - it seems to me - very related to De Kooning's Alzheimer's paintings. The mind, here, is seeking a "blank" and/or holding fast to tendrils of meaning which are stripped so bare as to be purely reflective of flesh tissue and irregular strands of cells.
1997, 16mm, color/si, approx. 2m (24fps), $20 "SELF SONG documents a body besieged by cancer. The amber glow of narrowly focused, miniscule, layers of flesh and skin suggests both victory and submission to death. The warm colors of the flesh grooves and textures of the skin seemingly suggests a body which is very much alive. Yet, there is always an impending darkness. Blackness surrounds the image, and occasionally, takes it over altogether. Furthermore, the complex grooves and patterns of the flesh struggle to maintain their focus, suggesting the obscuring and dissolving effects of cancer.
"In DEATH SONG the response to death is certainly more positive. The film begins with a smooth palate of blue hues. The blue returns toward the end of the film as a rigid and structurally organized screen, which suggests the permanent aspect of death. But initially it serves to contrast a blinding sequence of overexposed yellow frames. Within these images are drowning microscopic organisms. Their structure and energy is laid bare for us. However, these images are constantly being 'washed out' by a 'grubby' whiteness, which seeks to dissolve the image entirely. In this respect, we might view the purity of whiteness as being 'soiled' and encompassing. The all-encompassing nature of death is modified or tainted by cancer - organs and living systems are in a frantic trauma, trying not to be 'washed out.' By the end of the film, the image has shifted to the blue screen. The gentle layers of blues and greens suggests a comfortable and smooth, despite rigid, aspect of death. It is a space in which the dirty whiteness should not pierce. Yet, this vision is too idyllic in Brakhage's mind, and thus he allows the blueness to bleed from the side of the frame, opening the 'blinds' to the cancerous light." - Andre Munoz, 1997
1997, 16mm, color/si, approx. 4.5m (24fps), $20. Sale: $250 This film, a combination of hand-painting and photography, is a fulsome exposition of the themes of DOG STAR MAN. In that early epic I had envisioned The World Tree as dead, fit only for firewood; and at end of DOG STAR MAN I had chopped it up amidst a flurry of stars (finally Cassiopia's Chair): now, these many years later, I am compelled to comprehend YGGDRASILL as rooted in the complex electrical synapses of thought process, to sense it being alive today as when nordic legendry hatched it. I share this compulsion with Andrei Tarkovsky, whose last film The Sacrifice struggles to revive The World Tree narratively, whereas I simply present (one might almost say "document") a moving graph approximate to my thought process, whereby The Tree roots itself as the stars we, reflectively, are.
1997, 16mm, color/si, approx. 17m (24fps), $54 Here are a couple films from the mid-'60s, given to Gordon Rosenblum at the time, which surfaced this year needing preservation. I don't know what to make of either of them except some insistent quality of "poem" each somehow is.
1965-1998, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20 Dedicated to Michael McClure.
"Brakhage's new series of scratch-and-stain films, known as (...) or ellipses, are, among other things, a visual analogue to Abstract Expressionism. The onrushing imagery and the spatial conundrums it creates evoke not only Pollock but also the work of Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, and even Mark Rothko - that is Pollock et al., at 24 frames per second. Eschewing the camera, Brakhage scrapes away the film emulsion to create a thicket (or sometimes a spider's web) of white lines and rich, chemical colors. Some segments of the original footage appear to have been printed on negative stock or perhaps solarized - so that the blue and pink lines are inscribed on a white field. In any case, (...) is a cosmos. Rich without being ingratiating, the effect is one of rhythmic conflagration.
"A second 20-minute reel is more staccato mad chicken-scratch calligraphy fluttering out of a yellow void, sketchy lightning bolts or fireworks interrupted by a sudden field of turquoise. The third and shortest section reintroduces camera-derived imagery and, minimal as it may be (sunlight shimmering on water, seagull wheeling in the sky), it's still a shock to see "something." Brakhage continues to play with surfaces, layering the image with scratch bursts and soft-focus superimpositions; sentiment arrives with representation." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
"dear stan,
phil solomon in town last week for one of those very rare special screenings where beautiful work shown to fine attentions. he'd brought with him some rolls he'd printed of some of your new (?) work (yer output so prodigious the 'new' word a relative one), entirely comprised of scratches and was astonished because it appeared to me as memory, after lying ill for some weeks, most of the brain already well past the hurdle of a calamitous end so not resigned to dying exactly but going along for the ride, alone mostly in a world i no longer recognized, did venture into what some deem the mind's eye and saw that crystal ice palace which you've scratched onto leader so succinctly and powerfully, some polar recess earned through labours of illness, if you can call lying in bed work, a thousand shades of icy white distilling, crystallizing understandings, a hard pitiless world where there is only impeccability and knowledge, no longer couched or framed in the proprieties of the everyday which i worried, as i entered, and entered again seeing your film, that only the dead may visit here, shorn of the echo of personality or even flesh, a valley of dry bones and mine amongst them, where the origins of idea and understanding might find a place with their own kind, and like all of these ventures into what the greeks might have called home or an old world of gods, this one layered over in the intervening years with my wanting to feel again the old questions and answers, or something like normal life and so becoming a dim stern light waiting until it flourished again, re-visited by one vastly more intrepid than i, and able to wrestle it back into the domain of picture with nothing more than a few hand tools. i am in awe." - Mike Hoolboom, 1998
Note: It is clear now that Ellipsis Series ("...") is divided into reels which can be shown in any order (as distinct from parts which would ordinarily be shown chronologically).- Stan Brakhage Reel 1
1998, 16mm, color/si, 22m (24fps), $60 Reel 2
1998, 16mm, color/si, 15m (24fps), $80 Reel 3
1998, 16mm, color/si, 15m (24fps), $80 Reel 4
1998, 16mm, color/si, 20m (24fps), $80 This is a hand-painted work which involves a variety of colors applied within gouged and scratched shapes which approximate both swift shifts of bird-shape (legs, beaks and feather-spreads especially) and the Bird of Paradise flower-form as well, the former tending to metamorphize into the latter across the course of the work.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 3m (24fps), $20 CRICKET REQUIEM is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed film which juxtaposes bent, sometimes saw-tooth, scratch shapes multiply colored in pastels on a white field juxtaposed with emerging, and sometimes retreating, bi-pack imagery of the faintest imaginable lines (solarized lines) etched in brown-black. This interplay continues until the latter imagery begins to dominate with increasing recurrence. Then suddenly there's a vibrant mix of thick black lines (which is "echoed" once again near end of film) that alters the increasingly colored bent lines and their thin-stringy accompaniment, with rhythms which suggest a stately and emphatic end.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 3m (24fps), $20 This is a hand-painted work whose shapes are scratched on black leader filled with varieties of color: the resultant shapes tend to suggest insect-like movements, a rub of bent-lines together suggesting the electric hind legs of the cricket, whose movements engender (thru elaborate step-printing) quick pull-backs within frames of the film, so contrived as to create visual agitron lines within the zoom-like effect whose rhythm approximates a cricket's repetitive sound. This effect is echoed ephemerally later in the film as it nears its end of muted pull-down shapes and approximations of the earth-clod-likenesses and/or autumnal leaf-likenesses which begin the film.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 3m (24fps), $20 This film is a hand-painted combination of shapes which suggest, as appropriately colored, jungle, open veldt, horizontals of grasses, shag-shape yellow of lion's mane, the black & white stripes of the zebra, the eyes, the teeth, the tearing open into raw blood-red meat and curve of bone. Nonetheless the film is in no sense an animation work but rather a collection of mostly un-nameable shapes which gather round this recognizable iconography and visually dominate the image which repeats its, thus, ephemeral chase-and-catch increasingly closer, finally obliterating all but the "jewels," the multiple coloring, referred to in the title.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 6m (24fps), $30 . ***Please note those films designated by 18fps may also be shown at 24fps: I am in all cases designating a preference, not an absolute; and some of the SONGS (such as 23rd PSALM BRANCH: PART I and PART II) are, I think, better at the faster speed - they were, after all, made in Regular 8mm to be shown on variable-speed projectors. - Stan Brakhage
Interim
16mm Sale: $701.80Desistfilm
16mm Sale: $291.50The Way to Shadow Garden
16mm Sale: $379.50In Between
16mm Sale: $372.90Reflections on Black
16mm Sale: $392.70The Wonder Ring
16mm Sale: $303.60Nightcats
16mm Sale: $372.90Daybreak and Whiteye
16mm Sale: $372.90Loving
16mm Sale: $215.60Anticipation of the Night
16mm Sale: $1,258.40Cat's Cradle
Sirius Remembered
16mm Sale: $487.30Wedlock House: An Intercourse
16mm Sale: $379.50Window Water Baby Moving
16mm Sale: $611.60The Dead
16mm Sale: $436.70Thigh Line Lyre Triangular
16mm Sale: $310.20An Avant-Garde Home Movie
Blue Moses
16mm Sale: $423.50Oh Life, A Woe Story, The A-Test News
16mm Sale: $240.90Mothlight
16mm Sale: $500Dog Star Man: Complete Package
16mm Sale: $2,523.40Prelude: Dog Star Man
16mm Sale: $1,005.40Dog Star Man: Part 1
16mm Sale: $1,131.90Dog Star Man: Part 2
16mm Sale: $328.90Dog Star Man: Part 3
16mm Sale: $423.50Dog Star Man: Part 4
16mm Sale: $354.20Fire of Waters
16mm Sale: $271.70Pasht
16mm Sale: $271.70Three Films: Bluewhite, Blood's Tone, Vein
16mm Sale: $436.70Two: Creeley/McClure
16mm Sale: $158.40Zone Moment
The Horseman, the Woman, and the Moth
16mm Sale: $746.90Scenes From Under Childhood Section #1
16mm Sale: $1,460.80 (sound version); $1,195.70 (silent version).Scenes From Under Childhood Section #2
16mm Sale: $1,802.90Scenes From Under Childhood Section #3
16mm Sale: $1,195.70Scenes From Under Childhood Section #4
16mm Sale: $1,802.90The Animals of Eden and After
16mm Sale: $1,258.40The Machine of Eden
16mm Sale: $499.40The Weir-Falcon Saga
16mm Sale: $1,094.50The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes
16mm Sale: $1,157.20Angels'
16mm Sale: $133.10Eyes
16mm Sale: $1,182.50Deus Ex
16mm Sale: $1,145.10Door
16mm Sale: $293.70Fox Fire Child Watch
16mm Sale: $145.20The Peaceable Kingdom
16mm Sale: $342.10Western History
16mm Sale: $360.80Sexual Meditation: Room With View
16mm Sale: $158.40Sexual Meditation: Faun's Room, Yale
16mm Sale: $133.10Sexual Meditation: Office Suite
Sale: $139.70Sexual Meditation: Hotel
16mm Sale: $259.60Sexual Meditation: Open Field
16mm Sale: $271.70The Presence
16mm Sale: $170.50The Process
16mm Sale: $372.90The Riddle of Lumen
16mm Sale: $613.80The Shores of Phos: A Fable
16mm Sale: $462The Wold Shadow
16mm Sale: $145.20Sincerity I
16mm Sale: $986.70Aquarien
16mm Sale: $133.10Clancy
16mm Sale: $183.70Dominion
16mm Sale: $202.40Flight
16mm Sale: $221.10"He Was Born, He Suffered, He Died"
16mm Sale: $335.50Hymn to Her
16mm Sale: $145.20Skein
16mm Sale: $215.60Sol
16mm Sale: $209Star Garden
16mm Sale: $816.20The Stars Are Beautiful
16mm Sale: $784.30The Text of Light
16mm Sale: $2,251.70Short Films 1975 1-10
16mm Sale: $1,354.10Sincerity II
16mm Sale: $1,258.40Airs
Short Films 1976
16mm Sale: $746.90Super 8 Films
16mm Sale: $297
16mm Sale: $689.70
16mm Sale: $448.80
16mm Sale: $746.90
16mm Sale: $474.10
16mm Sale: $246.40
16mm Sale: $563.20
16mm Sale: $347.60
16mm Sale: $284.90
16mm Sale: $342.10Tragoedia
16mm Sale: $1,258.40The Domain of The Moment
16mm Sale: $581.90The Governor
16mm Sale: $1,998.70Soldiers and Other Cosmic Objects
Bird
16mm Sale: $158.40Burial Path
16mm Sale: $342.20Centre
Duplicity
16mm Sale: $878.90Duplicity II
16mm Sale: $611.60Nightmare Series
16mm Sale: $816.20Purity, and After
16mm Sale: $221.10Sincerity III
16mm Sale: $1,258.40Sluice
Sale: $158.40Thot-Fal'N
Sale: $448.8023rd Psalm Branch: Part I
16mm Sale: $1,151.7023rd Psalm Branch: Part II
16mm Sale: $1,182.50@
Sale: $291.20Creation
16mm Sale: $701.80The Roman Numeral Series
16mm Sale: $259.60
Sale: $322.30
16mm Sale: $123.20
Sale: $133.10
16mm Sale: $145.20
16mm Sale: $430.10
16mm Sale: $215.60
Sale: $177.10
Sale: $215.60Duplicity III
16mm Sale: $904.20Made Manifest
16mm Sale: $519.20Other
16mm Sale: $145.20Salome
16mm Sale: $139.70Sexual Meditation #1: Motel
Sale: $246.40Sincerity IV
16mm Sale: $1,258.40Sincerity V
16mm Sale: $1,390.40Songs 1-7
16mm Sale: $715Songs 8-14
16mm Sale: $828.30Songs 16-22
16mm Sale: $974.60Songs 24, 25, & 26
16mm Sale: $480.70Song 28 and Song 29
16mm Sale: SONG 28, $145.20; SONG 29, $133.10Aftermath
16mm Sale: $354.20Arabic Numeral Series
16mm Sale: $151.80
16mm Sale: $190.30
16mm Sale: $297
16mm Sale: $151.80
16mm Sale: $271.70
16mm Sale: $328.90
16mm Sale: $335.50
16mm Sale: $195.80
16mm Sale: $367.40
16mm Sale: $866.80
16mm Sale: $297
16mm Sale: $721.60
16mm Sale: $145.20
16mm Sale: $170.50
16mm Sale: $234.30
16mm Sale: $259.60
16mm Sale: $297
16mm Sale: $297
16mm Sale: $354.20The Garden of Earthly Delights
16mm Sale: $215Murder Psalm
16mm Sale: $740.30Nodes
16mm Sale: $170.50RR
16mm Sale: $354.20Unconscious London Strata
16mm Sale: $942.70Egyptian Series
16mm Sale: $752.40Hell Spit Flexion
16mm Sale: $145.20Tortured Dust
Note: Each of the four parts may be bought individually:
PART 1, $929.50; PART 2, $878.90; PART 3, $986.70; PART 4, $986.70Jane
16mm Sale: $499.40Fifteen Song Traits
16mm Sale: $1,056Flesh of Morning
16mm Sale: $651.20Caswallon Trilogy
16mm Sale: $448.80Confession
16mm Sale: $904.20The Loom
16mm Sale: $1,607.10Loud Visual Noises
16mm Sale: $151.80The Dante Quartet
16mm Sale: $480.70Faustfilm: An Opera: Part I
16mm Sale: $1,890.90Faust's Other: An Idyll
16mm Sale: $1,961.30Faust 3: Candida Albacore
16mm Sale: $1,069.20I ... Dreaming
16mm Sale: $372.90Kindering
Sale: $215.60Loud Visual Noises
16mm Sale: $215.60Marilyn's Window
16mm Sale: $354.20Matins
16mm Sale: $133.10Faust 4
16mm Sale: $1,960.20Visions in Meditation #1
16mm Sale: $721.60Visions in Meditation #2: Mesa Verde
16mm Sale: $721.60Babylon Series
16mm Sale: $221.10Babylon Series #2
16mm Sale: $171.10Babylon Series #3
16mm Sale: $234.30City Streaming
16mm Sale: $740.30Passage Through: A Ritual
16mm Sale: $1,764.40The Thatch of Night
16mm Sale: $246.40
16mm Sale: $151.80
16mm Sale: $151.80
16mm Sale: $215.60
Package: 1986-1990, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $30Visions in Meditation #3: Plato's Cave
16mm Sale: $740.30Visions in Meditation #4: D.H. Lawrence
16mm Sale: $721.60Agnus Dei Kinder Synapse
16mm Sale: $170.50A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea
16mm Sale: $2,378.20Christ Mass Sex Dance
16mm Sale: $246.40Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse
16mm Sale: $493.90Vision of the Fire Tree
16mm Sale: $170.50Boulder Blues and Pearls and ...
Crack Glass Eulogy
Untitled (For Marilyn)
Blossom Gift/Favor
Autumnal
Ephemeral Solidity
The Harrowing
Tryst Haunt
Stellar
Study in Color and Black and White
Three Homerics
Black Ice
16mm Sale: $287.50Cannot Exist
Cannot Not Exist
Chartres Series
First Hymn to the Night - Novalis
16mm Sale: $402.50The Mammals of Victoria
Naughts
Trilogy
We Hold These
I ...
The "b" Series
Earthen Aerie
In Consideration of Pompeii
The Lost Films
Paranoia Corridor
Spring Cycle
... Preludes 1-6
... Preludes 7-12
... Preludes 13-18
... Preludes 19-24
Beautiful Funerals
Blue Value
The Fur of Home
Polite Madness
Sexual Saga
Shockingly Hot
Two Found Objects of Charles Boultenhouse
The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm
Commingled Containers
Divertimento
Self Song/Death Song
Yggdrasill Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind
Female Mystique and Spare Leaves (For Gordon)
"..." Reels 1, 2, 3 and 4
The Birds of Paradise
Cricket Requiem
The Earthsong of the Cricket
The Lion and the Zebra Make God's Raw Jewels