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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
16mm Sale: please inquire for price.
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: 1986-1990, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $30
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 It required the most exacting editing process ever; and in the course of that work it occurred to me that I'd originally made THE RIDDLE OF LUMEN hoping someone would make an "answering" film and entertain my visual riddle in the manner of the riddling poets of yore.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
16mm Sale: $1,764.40
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
16mm Sale: please inquire for price.
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
16mm Sale: please inquire for price.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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"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
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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
16mm Sale: please inquire for price.
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
16mm Sale: please inquire for price.
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, 18m, $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
"The full 35-millimeter frame allows for more detail and diversity than Brakhage's customary narrower gauges. In the first section, multicolored blobs contrast with fuzzy photographed lights; in the third, flickering specks become hundreds of tiny rods and later cracks in paint. Rhythmic complexity has long been a characteristic of Brakhage's work, but the series takes polyphony to new heights by creating different movements in different portions of the frame; there's a sense of shapes being generated and reabsorbed in a cosmic vision of eternal change." —Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
1995, 35mm, color, silent, 12 minutes, $80 Rental
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.
This work is in five reels (numbered, but called "reels" so that they don't take on the connotations of "Parts" - thus each simply a part of the "trail" of colored scratches, white scratches ((on black & white leader) which suggest, to me, a passage). The third "reel" combines these scratches with some motion picture film, mostly of the ocean. The fifth reel is the only one which has a sound track; but of course that makes the whole work a "SOUND film" because the audio track must be turned-on from the beginning.
"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
1998, 16mm, color/si, 22m (24fps), $60
1998, 16mm, color/si, 15m (24fps), $80
1998, 16mm, color/si, 15m (24fps), $80
Reel #4 of (...) is a recapitulation of the primary variations of scratched (on black leader) shapes and additive colors (i.e. those which are composed of toned light in the step printing process) as well as the solarizations (i.e. the combination of negative and positive images of the scratches) and the negative imagery itself (with its almost phosphorescent negative coloration): these visual themes (forms, textures and tones) eventually resolve themselves into an amalgam, as it were - something that seems "new", a "breakthrough", so to speak, but is actually combos of earlier variants.
1998, 16mm, color/si, 20m (24fps), $8
Reel #5 of (...) is composed of scratch-imagery edited to the music of Flocking by James Tenney. The music is allowed to play for about 2 _ minutes accompanied only by black leader: then there is a sudden flare of pure white which begins to flicker with negative-colored ephemeral shapes, until finally the music and a fulsome mass of scratched images are accompanying eachother.
At times a distinctly different quality of colored image appears and continues for awhile (non-orange negative photography of painted film as well as picture images, altogether unrecognizable, un-nameable). The audio-visual aesthetic is such that there are very few absolute synchronizations between image and sound, but rather music "echoing" visuals or visuals cut into the rhythmic patterns of previous music, so that the two "go along" together interweaving without either dominating the other (which is the principal reason the music is allowed at beginning to establish its aesthetic in the mind of the listener before he or she is expected to follow the development of visual patterns): both audio and visual end at the same time, bringing some sense of closure to the event of the film.
1998, 16mm, color/so, 18m, $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
This hand-painted step-printed film begins in a field of white light slightly bespeckled with ephemeral glazes of flecks of silver which gradually give way to pale suggestions of pastel colors. These take shape occasionally and flicker the forthcoming bits of solid colored and multiply formed abstract images, a few brief sequences-of-such intersperced with the cloud-suggestive silvered passages as at beginning, which eventually end the film.
"When a hailstone forms, it makes a vertical voyage through a cloud; heavy updraft winds keep it aloft while downdrafts force it to fall. As the hailstone falls, its outer layer melts, shifts and then re-freezes in a complex formation when it rises. You can determine the number of trips a hailstone has made through a cloud by counting the number of rings that have formed around its center. Eventually, the aggregate becomes too heavy and falls as a singular ball of ice.
"In CLOUD CHAMBER, I felt that I saw what I might have seen, had I been at the nucleus of such a hailstone, collecting the colors of the cloud while making a circular voyage and finally falling at the saturation point - the heavy colors at the end of the film. The illustrations on the front are evidence of this collection of diverse colors on a hailstone, due to the obvious existence of such colors (in some form or another) in the clouds that generate them!" - Courtney Hoskins
1999, 16mm, color/si, 4.5m, $2
This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work (involving Positives and Negatives of original painted source material in combination, as well as superimpositions filmed at 24 fps and 48 fps) is a very organic be-seeming darkly colored work (blood and rust reds mixed with off-greens), as if microscopic images of connective (and other) cells and/or threads of internal muscles were caught in a 'dance' (i.e. contrapuntal varieties-of-rhythm increasingly coordinated) ultimately suggestive of sex. The forms of the work also vaguely metaphor male and female exterior nudity coupling.
The evolution of the work is almost purely rhythmic as increased tempos, in ever more complex interaction, evolve to coordinated climax and brief aftermath.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 4.5m, $25
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 hand-painted step-printed film begins with streaks of glare light and vibrantly colored forms apparently in the sky forinasmuch as there appears, frame center, the tapered shape of a tower, a silhouette as it were against the backdrop of the flaring sky. As this shape of tower disappears, the conflagration of scratches and paints seems grounded and takes on the semblence of a battle of knights, their lances, horses, et al, often against a scattering of star-like flecks until finally the silhouette of the tower reappears as if much closer, certainly thicker and straight-sided. The film finishes as textures which tend to suggest an entrance into the textured walls of the tower, textures and stars intermingled with what may well seem chain-mail as well.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 2.5m, $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
This is a photographed filmic searching-for-whales, the camerawork and editing attempting to approximate something of the rubbing up against water of the whale, of the surface foam and the hard coils of water through which it swims, of the gray-greens and blacks of its environment. And then suddenly there is the vision of many whales rolling, breeching, twisting and turning in various play with eachother, a mother and baby slapping fins together, soforth. This film is about the identification with the world of the whale and the experience of the seeing, then (at the distance of being human), many killer whales in glimpses of our given sights of them.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 5.5m, $20
PERSIAN SERIES #1: This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes intersperced by darkness, then becomes lit lightning-like by sharp multiply-colored twigs-of shape, all resolving into shapes of decay.
PERSIAN SERIES #2: Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, almost black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script.
PERSIAN SERIES #3: Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed weave of tones moving from oranges & yellows to blue-greens, then retreating (dissolves of zooming away) to both rounded and soft-edged shapes shot with black.
PERSIAN SERIES #4: Elaborate petal-like, stamen-and-stem-like, multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous (in the PERSIAN SERIES) shape, evolving back to brilliant petals against what was as at beginning of #4.
PERSIAN SERIES #5: Dark blood red slow shifting tones (often embedded in dark) / (often shot-thru with parallel wave-like lines) composed of all previous shapes AND flowers as if trying, linierally, to evolve a glyph-script.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 15m, $45
This hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which emerges a series of landscapes, gardens, exteriors of mansions, castles and the like, then (as yellow predominates over vegetable greens, sherwood greens and deep floral reds, blood reds) interior corridors and rooms, as if lit by chandeliers and cendelabras - all of which eventually bursts into flames, explosions, which somewhat 'echo' visually the beginning of the film.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 5.5m, $20
WORM AND WEB LOVE begins with bracketed light, a throbbing worm in the sand and sea foam mixed with grass and oceanic detritus, soon superimposed upon the dark blue-toned face of a man, then a woman (Michael McClure and Amy Evans McClure), each seen, then on, through superimpositions of drifting smoke and the back-lit stark grid of a spider's web. The obvious affections of the man and woman, their clear display of love, is metaphored in these tenuous superimpositions, culminating in the frantic movements of the spider itself and the dance of joy of the features of the couple in loving resolution.
1999, 16mm, color/si, 4.5m, $25
More Stan Brakhage films: 1952-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003