1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003
1952-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003
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
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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
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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
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Music by John Cage.
Portrait of Jesse Collins: a daydream nightmare in the surrealist tradition.
1955, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
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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
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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
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"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
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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
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"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
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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
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"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
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"The first months of marriage, with moments of mutual awareness, frightening understandings, lovemaking." - Cinema 16
1959, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $30
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"... 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
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"... 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
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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
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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, 4m, $20
Commissioned by Hazel Barnes for her television series. Inspired by Jean Paul Satre's novel Nausea-the attempted suicide scene.
1962, 16mm, b&w/si, 3.5m, $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
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Three TV "concretes."
1963, 16mm, b&w/si, 5m, $20
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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
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"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
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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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
1967, 16mm, color/si, 10s, $20; 35mm, color/si, 10s, $35
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.
Image courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper.
1967, 16mm, color/si, 25m, $75
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(A continuation of the above-described work.)
1969, 16mm, color/si, 40m, $120
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(A continuation of the above-described work.)
1969, 16mm, color/si, 25m, $75
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(A continuation of the above-described work.)
1970, 16mm, color/si, 45m, $135
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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
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1968 16mm, color, silent, 24-1/4 min. rental price: 40.00 rental
1969 16mm, color, silent, 32-3/4 min. rental price: 55.00 rental
1969, Reg 8mm black and white/silent 35 minutes $90 Rental
More Stan Brakhage films: 1952-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003