1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003
1952-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003
This film begins with points of light defining a dark space out of which a female dancer (Vivienne Palmer) emerges dressed in a semi-transparent green dress. Her dance is visually 'echoed' by close-up superimpositions of her arms, legs, and feet, and then later by her distant figure seeming to mimic and/or perhaps to control her foregrounded, cometimes back-lit, image. She often pauses thoughtfully in her dance, breaks step, walks away, etc., defining the perimeters of the dance. Finally she appears naked, midst dance, and takes heraldic stance at end.
2000, 16mm, color/silent, 6.5m, $20
This photographic (as distinct from hand-painted) work is the third in what has come to be called 'the Vancouver Island films' and, as such, concentrates metaphorically upon 'mid-age crisis,' a psychological state comparable to 'but not relieved by' Death. The title is from Dickens' David Copperfield.
This film of single-strand photography begins with the 'fire' of reflective light on water and on the barest inferences of a ship. Throughout, the interwoven play of light and water tell the inferred 'tale' of the film through rhythm the tempo, through visible textures and forms in gradual evolution, through resultant 'moods' generated by these modes of making, and, then, by the increasingly distant boat images, birds, animals, fleeting silhouettes of people and their artifacts, flotsome and jetsome of the sea-dead, as well as (near end, and almost as at a funeral) flowers in bloom, swallowed by darkness midst the crumbling of the sand castles. These nameable objects (sometimes, at first, quite enigmatic) are the frets of Symbol; but always the symbolic content is swept back into the weave of sea and light and seen, as is the merry-go-round near beginning of film, or the horizontally photographed fountain mimicing [sic] incoming ocean waves, to be as if spawned in the mind during oceanic contemplation. In fact, the structure of the entire film might be characterized thus: meditation on ocean is interrupted continually by rapidly cut visual frets of (at first) irritated thought; but then gradually across the course of the film these fraughts of symbols and rapidly edited constructs become a calm 'kin to resignation, become more at-one with the diminishing light and incoming waves. The turning point of the film is near its mid-point where tall and relatively violent waves smash their cold and fearsome colors left to right across the screen, interwoven with an old man sitting in a dark blue room, followed by hints of backyard fences, grasses, distant ephemeral flowers and a hung whirling decoration. Reminders of this midpoint are accomplished through visual rhymes such as similarities of blue and a madly whirling kite against a bright sky, as well as by the (near end) entire sequence in which multiple garish flowers invade the (by then) almost fully meditative sea imagery. There are visual rhymes also connecting this work with its two previous 'parts' (A CHILD'S GARDEN and THE SERIOUS SEA AND THE MAMMALS OF VICTORIA), such as an orange ball attached to a boat which 'rhymes' with thrown orange balls in previous film. As the whole film is stiched [sic] with red-orange-yellow flares (indicators of light-struck sections) at beginning and ending of individual 100 foot rolls (making of the film a distinctive sequential evolution), so the end of the film has a slight flare-up (or fillup of hope?) after burdgeoning dark.
2000, 16mm, color/silent, 50m, $135
PERSIAN SERIES #6 begins with what appears to be dried red and yellow rose petals, suddenly shot-thru with blue which causes a shift to violets and greens. This mash of colors thickens and is scored by white and then black, calligraphic lines, which are "echoed" in all previous floral colors whose "dance" seems to turn clock-wise and "explode" into fiery reds.
PERSIAN SERIES #7: very pale, thin, hieroglyphic pinks, greens and blues in a white space which is thickened over by ribbed mashes of these colors which "dissolve" into varied shapes almost suggesting landscapes and ephemeral bouquets. Dark blurred shapes mix with eachother and give-way to clock-wise-turning pillars of yellow, scored with white glyphs, at times, and fading mashes of tones and, finally, a calligraphic shape.
PERSIAN SERIES #8: Pale petal and stem-like shapes counter punted rhythmically by an even paler "background" of truly ephemeral of truly ephemeral (almost invisible) shapes. Again, the foreground movement is clockwise and often "ribbed" as the film darkens into a blend of foreground/background and, eventually, a meld as of white hardened clots fretted by glyphs.
PERSIAN SERIES #9: sharp edged "chunks" of color set in black, straight, often multicolored, lines piercing shapes, imprisoning them, until they are fragmented bits of color in black: repeat of this theme again and again until darkness prevails, but is then broken open by pure white shards and "spears" restoring the original "dance" of hard-edge shapes and lines, which then begin to whirl block-wise, intersperced with fade-outs, and then shatter into "confetti" texture, in black, burnt "sugar-shapes" and the overwhelming flare of yellow.
PERSIAN SERIES #10: "twigs" of color in space, and pure white "ghosts" of them in the background interspersed with dark amalgams of these and conglomerate forms. The resolve of these themes is a combination of "amalgams" and "ghosts" at one in interplay, and then dark slashed spaces with "webs" of white, webbed spaces on white and, finally, solarization of colored forms - midst which the frame-line rises from bottom and driftes a few seconds visible, creating an insubstantiality of the frame of these images.
PERSIAN SERIES #11 begins with a "window" of yellow paint adrift in the full frame of multicolored paint-shapes. Alternating black-space/white-space exists as a back-drop for slashes and curves of color - reds and blues shifting to red-blue-green, then yellow, etc. slashed in black.
PERSIAN SERIES #12: "hot" by-play of reds-greens-yellows in black, blurred, finally, as the color shapes are shifted violently from side to side, finally ending of a sharp entanglement of multicolored twig-like and/or stem-like forms.
2000, 16mm, color/silent, 18m, $60
WATER FOR MAYA is a hand-painted work which came into being during a film interview with Martina Kudlacek about Maya Deren. There was a sudden recognition of Maya's intrinsic love of water and thus of all Mayan liquidity in magic conjunction, reflection, etc.
2000, 16mm, color/silent, 5m, $20
The Jesus Trilogy and Coda is composed of the four following parts:
(1) IN JESUS NAME presents an almost continuous fluttering movement midst the complexity of multiple small shapes in mostly autumnal colors, like unto a wind moving through fall leaves. Embedded in this skein (almost as if branches of this scene) are the dark lines ephemerally (almost invisibly) composing the conventional face of Christ.
(2) THE BABY JESUS begins with pearl-pinks and gold-flecked shapes midst 'garden greens'. It proceeds to contrasting desert scenery - slashes of sand-yellow under black 'sky', with ephemeral suggestions of animal locomotion. Then there's some sense of darkened interior, the colors of straw and wood, slight furtive hints of beast features, hooded 'faces' and swaddling folds. Rolling hills, and a starred 'night sky' with flecks of herded white, then a gathereing (sic) of colors as of collected people shapes. After interveening (sic) black, the beseeming rocky side of a hill increasingly flecked with blood-red. The desert-likeness comes again with, again, animal-like locomotion. Mills, mottled white, like snow, give way finally to peacefully wood-toned enclosures.
(3) JESUS WEPT utilizes a variety of shapes and colors so fretted and interlocked with darkness as to create the sense of a glamorous terror within which palpable shapes of 'tears' appear and weave a counterbalance of sorrowful calm. Because these 'tears' are as if in bas-relief (side and front lit), textured and altogether of such a visual solidity, they form and (sic) aesthetic bulwark against the (back lit) fret of forms.
(4) CODA: CHRIST ON CROSS contains the most easily nameable of all the shapes in this trilogy: it is, thus, an aesthetic 'summing-up' with full emphasis upon the crucifixion which is visible again and again as a mass of twisting lines and tortured forms, flecked with vermillion blood-likeness. The interveening (sic) scenes are stark, dark dramatics, reactive to the recurring cross. The conventional face of Jesus is occasionally visible as lines that are consonent (sic) with the, at times, almost renaissance draftsmanship of these scenes. The attempt is to sum-up Death as iconic triumph in relation to the three previous films.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 20m, $60
LOVESONG is a hand-painted elaborately step-printed work which utilizes light transparencies in combination with light bounced directly off the surface of the individual film frames to establish and eventually enmesh two distinct entities of variable paint (more distinct than superimposition or bi-packing could acvieve) - said entities taking on separate personae against which (and finally in conjunction with which) the glyphic representations of body-parts gradually entwining, separating and re-combining again and again, are interwoven with the expressively drawn sexual organs represented in dark outlines which often 'explode' into black sperm-marks surrounding mutliply colored egg-likenesses.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 12m, $40
LOVESONG 2 is a rapid recapitulation of the tactics of Lovesong, without the multiple rhythms of variable step-printing: it is a straight frame-to-frame 'run-through' of similar (albeit newly painted) images of love-making.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 3m, $20
Three qualities of hand- painted imagery inter-weave throughout this film: (1) a mash of thick lines delineating colored shapes, (2) thin black lines, like drawings, which most suggest recognizable body-parts, and (3) globs of pure color at inter-play with each other. An irregularity of rhythm (produced by repetition of frames 2, 3 and 4 times) creates the sense of a driving force propelling the inter-weave of these essentially abstract displays: three-fourths of the way through the rhythmic intensity falters, 'breaks down' as it were, almost becomes a mockery of its earlier sexual regularity. Instead of variety midst regular beat, the forms suggest some loose variance. Two formal factors seem to 'save the day,' as it were: (1) an increase of beseeming textures, and (2) interruptive white flashes; and these create a meaningful (rhythmically and tonally coherent) ending.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 10m, $30
A natural companion piece to Lovesong 3, this (also hand-painted) work counterbalances the rhythmic irregularities and, one might say, temporal despairs with a steadiness of beat, creating an absolute progression of formal feeling and meaning. The sense of line drawings, and consequent pictorial representation has given way to shape-in-space composed of only four colors: Lavender, Purple, Green, and Turquoise. Their dance with the darkness suggests an inter-action of bodies. At end there's a flare to a field of white within which a very tiny shape (almost like lips) pulses and finally flickers out.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 10m, $30
Red and ephemeral blue and purple plant shapes half-curled against a tan ground, which begins to flash white cracks in dried mud patterns. A flush of watery blues (in this hand-painted step-printed film) brightens the plant-skein into a veriety of greens mixed into all other colors-all darkening into smeared mud-blacks with microscopic beseeming black "splatters" (where mud-like cracks used to be.) The turquoise blues, red and tans resolve into a flare of red at end.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 4m, $20
Night Mulch
This film is hand-painted and is essentially about the interplay between hypnagogic vision and words, the effect of the one upon the other, the contest between the two. The hypnagogic (hand-paint) shapes are multiple and variably complex that they tend to suggest a variety of almost recognizable shapes, such as many brightly colored people or a mulch of flowers. The words, such as "Subversive" and "Liberating", along with many which are unreadable, seem to struggle for an equality of viewer comprehension, almost as if the brain were coming to terms again with the origins of written language: the pun "Quills" accentuates this. In all cases, language is subsumed, but leaves a distinctive trail of itself distinct from the painted images.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 2.5m.
Very
The second, of these companion films (interspersed by a "Technicolor+ countdown") introduces The Movies (Narrative Dramatic Scenes briefly flickering midst hypnogogic-painting) in addition to the closed-eye vision and language combination of Night Mulch. "Subversive" and "Liberating" are repeated, but "Liberating" actually seems to be withdrawing (zooming away) in the mixture of paints. To emphasize The Movies, these is a brief tribute to the actor Michael Caine. The resolution of these contesting 'force-fields; of visual thought (as I imagine them) is a sense of distinction of hypnagog over and above Photography (or Picture-i.e. a collector of framed named things) as well as the words/names themselves.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 3.5m.
Night Mulch & Very, 16mm, color/silent $30; 35mm $60
This is a hand painted, step-printed work which views Occam's economical vision of life ('The Razor's Edge') as something more thread-like: a staggered black line, growing steadily more solid, albeit often 'tangled', trails vertically across the film surface, insinuating itself (its 'life', as it were) through a series of various paint shapes, some of which seem as if about to destroy it, bury it in black patches or cut into it: finally the line is as if severed in glare of white leader ending in multicolored paint-patch.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, ~5m, $28
PERSIAN SERIES #13 is a series of extremely dark images, mostly in purples, greens, and fiery red-orange-yellows, shifting one to another in displays of textured shapes which suggest a thick tangle weave of threads.
PERSIAN SERIES #14 is composed of muted color-shapes shifting variably in juxtaposition and contrast with high-contrast black & white abstract patterns.
PERSIAN SERIES #15 is a rapid shift of patterns black & white playing off against muted coils of color.
PERSIAN SERIES #16 is an even MORE exaggerated contrast of color and black-&-white patterning.
PERSIAN SERIES #17 is a series of quite distinct globules of paint brilliantly colored and shifting as if vertically in the plane (as different from the more horizontally oriented previous parts.
PERSIAN SERIES #18 is almost calligraphic in its overlays of dark (occasionally colored) glyphs backed by brilliant color motifs.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 11m, $48
ROUNDS is a hand-painted film composed of a series of film loops printed in such a fashion (bi-packed and combined with careful irregularity) that, while there is a feeling of repetitive (sic) familiarity, no actual example of specific repetition is easily seeable. The colored abstract forms seem as if figures at a carnival and/or sometimes as if 'on stage': thus their actions are, then, particularly theatrical. When they most appear recognizable as the shapes of paint, which they are, these events seem the dramatics of the Abstract Expressionist movement - i.e. dramatically gestural. The film begins with blues and reds, occasionally yellows, and very occasionally limned by greens - these played off against clear white spaces or stark blacks. Gradually the film resolves its 'color keys' to an amalgamation of rapid intermix and balance of the four key tones midst darks and lights, eventually overwhelmed by a film-flare of yellows at end.
2001, 16mm, color/silent, 11m, $35
2002, 16mm, color/silent, 3m, $20
This hand-painted work presents the semblance of a dark brown wall, ripped open and pocked with yellowed visions of rooms and other interiors, gradually (and always occasionally) intersperced with multiply colored holes, revealing exteriors beyond the shifting facades of the "wall". The openings into and through the wall become larger, and then become smaller again (so small as to seem semblances of stars at times). Finally the enlargements take over the scene and eventually demolish all sense of "wall". This film is very inspired by the paintings of Gunther Forg, and with respect to St. John of the Cross, is a hand painted envisionment of holy depression.
2002, 16mm, color/silent, 3.5m, $20
A hand-painted work beginning with a thicket of curled black lines over flesh tones shaping briefly into sex organs. There is a sense of pulsing darkness which breaks ints curled lines into coupling body forms which then settle back into something like the beginning of the film.
2002, 16mm, color/silent, 2m.
Bright and very "hot" non-organic hand-painted colors and interweaving forms which darken intil cracks of ephemeral blues appear. There is, throughout, a gentle rhythmic "push" of hot-colored forms against each other, a sense of totally pervasive calm. Finally the textures of cracks gives way to some sense of sands-but as a softness. The lines which suggest coupling exist finally as if rubbed smooth by shifts of grain and gently shattered forms.
2002, 16mm, color/silent, 3.5m.
Lovesong #5 & 6 $20
A single roll, edited in camera, reveals a small portrait of our
ever-present cat. - Marilyn Brakhage
2002, 16mm, color/silent, 3m, $20
"This film is an entirely hand-painted film composed of a combination of highly complex step-printed super-impositions of hand-painting (at variable speeds), and raw and highly textured strips of hand-painted original film run at speed (24 distinct frames every second). It can be considered the fourth part of what had been called the "Vancouver Island Trilogy" (A CHILD'S GARDEN and THE SERIOUS SEA, THE MAMMALS OF VICTORIA, and THE GOD OF DAY HAD GONE DOWN UPON HIM), making the entire work now the "Vancouver Island Quartet."
"Purple flashes are followed by a curtain of purple and blues, first seemingly static and then in motion. Close-ups of textures of paint evolve into flashes of jewel-like red, then more cascading blues and purples and white - 'falling,' seemingly, down from the top of the screen, at other times multi-directional bursts of rolling colors. Red, blue and yellow course through in an up-down motion, then blues and yellows enter from left and right in a complex medley of not solidly formed, but very vibrant pulsations of color, at times only slightly hinting at a solidity of "wallness" upon which the paint might exist. But it is a "wall" suffused with light. Suggestions of fire and water, textures of paint on wall, sparkling jewels, and chunks of blue-white ice arise, as the textures of paint at times become a riotous rainbow of tumbling hues flowing in a river of light, creating the paradoxical experience of a fully substantial insubstantiality
"The film clearly echoes back to earlier Brakhage films, including "A Child's Garden" and the "seriousness" of the sea, as well as hand-painted works such as SPRING CYCLE and STELLAR. The image holds briefly on a vision of depth of black with jewel-colored edges, followed by a wash of yellow, more 'panels' of color, then sheets of ice-like blues joined by red and finally turning to dark green. There is a seeming movement into the details of the paint itself. Curtains of black web-like lines explode once again into tumbling yellows and mauves, slowing, then becoming faster again, going into a step-like movement, frame to frame, of views of walls that are not walls, showing an increasing tactility, with occasional apparent "holes," and then resuming a multi-directional flow, and moving on into a recapitulation of some earlier forms: greens, reds, blues, red/black, greens and yellows, with sparkling blacks and swatches of red, loosening up once again on a whiter ground, with forms reminiscent of swimming spermatazoa and ending finally on a cumulative repetition of earlier visual themes."-Marilyn Brakhage
2002 16mm, color/silent, 35 minutes, $140.00 Rental
"Resurrectus est is a hand painted film which suggests, from the first, a spread of fragments of plants and flowers, individual petals and bits of twig with multiple colors, with much green 'leafiness'. This gives way to solid yellows and browns of, or suggesting, dried grass and earth (the decay, as it were, of the above mentioned fragments); but then again, and so spaced with clear light whites as to appear airy, wind-blown, somesuch, miniscule fragments of plant life, gradually enlarging to fill-the-frame. Amidst the many floral and earthen tones, there is a particular ethereal pale, almost phosphorescent, blue which so dominates the scenes of its appearance as to cause the darker earthen yellows to lighten into a mixture with the blue that suggests abstract Easter: these tones finally take over to such an extent that the flower-fragments can no longer be seen clearly as such. The whole work turns upon the dominance of yellow-and-blue to such an extent that, by end, the film can only be seen as "visual music," completely (or predominantly) "abstract" and as if composed of air itself (quite distinct, say, from "blue sky" "yellow sun" somesuch)." - Marilyn Brakhage, May 23, 2002
2002 16mm, color/silent, 9 minutes, $30
A hand painted film that was used as an introduction to the Viennale International Film Festival and shown before each program.
2002 16mm color/silent 30 seconds $20
"This film was made on 35mm whereby Stan scratched off the emulsion of the film using his fingernail. The original was stepped printed by Mary Beth Reed. This film is available is both 16mm and 35mm and is in black and white."-Dominic Angerame
Scratching on spit-softened emulsion with bare fingernails," Stan
completed this work -- all that he could manage of his long
dreamed-of "Chinese Series" -- in his bed, a couple of months before
his death. Printed by Courtney Hoskins, who has written that: "On the
negative, it seemed to have the essence of Chinese characters --
"strokes" and blocks, etc. In motion, it seems almost like running
through a humid bamboo forest . . . green and yellow stalks create
these glowing shadows as they cut across the sunlight.
2003, 16mm or 35mm, black and white/silent, 2 minutes, $25 Rental
"Stan's Window is the last film completed by Stan Brakhage. This is a live action film with poetic images from inside of Stan's house in Victoria, Canada."-Dominic Angerame
Titled to echo Marilyn's Window ("one of the first films I made after
meeting Marilyn"), this photographed film is a self-portrait-at-home
-- Stan's new, and last "home," in Victoria, British Columbia.
2003, 16mm color/silent 13 minutes $40 Rental
More Stan Brakhage films: 1952-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2003