1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003
1952-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003
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
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"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
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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), 3m, $20
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Portrait of the great chess master, aesthetician, human being, Eugene Salome.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 3m (18fps), $20
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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A naked boy with recorder and a view from the dump. The emotional properties of talk.
1967-85, 16mm, color/si, 14.5m (18fps), $45
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SONG 28 - scenes as texture; SONG 29 is a portrait of the artist's mother.
1966-1986, 16mm, color/si, 8m (18fps), $25
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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.
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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.
1980, 16mm, color/si, 5.5m (18fps), $20
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1980, 16mm, color/si, 7m (18fps), $20
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1980, 16mm, color/si, 10.5m (18fps), $30
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 10m (18fps), $30
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 5m (18fps), $20
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 11m (18fps), $30
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 11m (18fps), $30
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 7m (18fps), $20
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 12m (18fps), $35
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 32m (18fps), $90
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 10.5m (18fps), $30
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 27m (18fps), $80
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 5m, (18fps), $20
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 5.5m (18fps), $20
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 7.5m (18fps), $20
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 8.5m (18fps), $25
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 8m (18fps), $25
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 8.5m (18fps), $25
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1981, 16mm, color/si, 9m (18fps), $25
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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
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"... 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
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"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
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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
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"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
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A series of meditations on Egyptian hieroglyphs - designations (as I finally saw them) of nurturing godheads.
1983, 16mm, color/si, 17m, $52
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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
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"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
Note: Each of the four parts may be bought individually,please inquire for price.
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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, $25; 35mm, $75
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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(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
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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
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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
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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, 35mm, color/si, 30sec $20 Rental
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
35mm color/si, 0.5m, $35
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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
35mm, color/si, 30sec $20 Rental
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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
16mm Sale: $215.60
Package of 3 films: 1986-1990, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $30
More Stan Brakhage films: 1952-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003