Stan Brakhage

1952-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003

The Animals of Eden and After

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
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The Machine of Eden

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
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Scenes From Under Childhood Section #4

(A continuation of the above-described work.)

1970, 16mm, color/si, 45m, $135
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The Weir-Falcon Saga

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
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The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes

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
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Angels'

This then the property of many angels.

1971, 16mm, color/si, 2m, $20
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Eyes

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
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Deus Ex

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
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Door

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
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Fox Fire Child Watch

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
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The Peaceable Kingdom

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
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Trip to Door

Jane and the kids go to town.

1971 16mm 12 minutes $25 Rental

Western History

A thumbnail History of the Western World, all centered around the basketball court.

1971, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25
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Sexual Meditation: Room With View

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
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Sexual Meditation: Faun's Room, Yale

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
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Sexual Meditation: Office Suite

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
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Sexual Meditation: Hotel

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
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Sexual Meditation: Open Field

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
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The Presence

This is the rachety Japanese wood-block style - a short "spook movie."

1972, 16mm, color/si, 3.5m, $20
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The Process

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
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The Riddle of Lumen

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
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The Shores of Phos: A Fable

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
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The Wold Shadow

"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, 3m, $20
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Sincerity I

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
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Aquarien

"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
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Clancy

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
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Dominion

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
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Flight

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
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"He Was Born, He Suffered, He Died"

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
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Hymn to Her

"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
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Skein

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
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Sol

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
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Star Garden

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
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The Stars Are Beautiful

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
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The Text of Light

"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
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Short Films 1975 1-10

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
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Sincerity II

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
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Airs

Originally shot in Super 8mm; enlarged to 16mm.

1976, 16mm, color/si, 24m (18fps), $70

Short Films 1976

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
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Super 8 Films

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
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Airs

1976, S8mm, color/si, 20m, $60
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Desert

1976, S8mm, color/si, 11m, $35
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The Dream, NYC, The Return, The Flower

1976, S8mm, color/si, 24.5m, $75
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Gadflies

1976, S8mm, color/si, 12.5m, $40
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Highs

1976, S8mm, color/si, 16.5m, $80
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Rembrandt, Etc., and Jane

1976, S8mm, color/si, 17.5m, $55
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Sketches

1976, S8mm, color/si, 9m, $30
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Trio

1976, S8mm, color/si, 6.5m, $20
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Window

1976, S8mm, color/si, 10.5m, $30
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Tragoedia

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
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The Domain of The Moment

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
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The Governor

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
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Soldiers and Other Cosmic Objects

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

Bird

This is the first clear vision I've had of the hot-blooded dinosaurs still living among us.

1978, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
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Burial Path

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
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Centre

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
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Duplicity

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
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Duplicity II

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
16mm Sale: $611.60

Nightmare Series

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
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Purity, and After

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
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Sincerity III

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
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Sluice

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
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Thot-Fal'N

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
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23rd Psalm Branch: Part I

1966/1978, 16mm, color/si, 30m (18fps), $90
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23rd Psalm Branch: Part II

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
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@

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
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Creation

"... 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
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The Roman Numeral Series

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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VI

What shall one say?

1980, 16mm, color/si, 13m (18fps), $30
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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
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VIII

This is the most formal of all these works.

1980, 16mm, color/si, 4m (18fps), $20 16mm
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IX

This is the most absolute.

1980, 16mm, color/si, 2m (18fps), $20 16mm
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