Kermit Sheets, assistant director; Frank Stauffacher, photography; Howard Brubeck, music.
One of the first major works of the San Francisco film movement, MOTHER'S DAY is a painfully humorous recollection of childhood in which a family of singular adults recreate their infancy by behaving as they did when growing up.
"Humorous, satirical, and overwhelmingly skillful, this ironic camera exploration of the artist's world of memory, imagination and perception is among the finest, most challenging films yet produced in this country." - Arthur Knight
"MOTHER'S DAY for me is one of the great films in film history." - Peter Kubelka
Awards: Belgium, 1949; Venice, 1952.
1948, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
A satiric version of the Hero Quest, about a naive country boy's search for his ideal Love in the big city (San Francisco) with crazy frustrations at every turn. Broughton himself enacts bewildered Jimmy. Photography by Frank Stauffacher; jazz score by Weldon Kees.
"Hilarious and very witty. Mr. Broughton is an odd bird in the film aviary." - Manchester Guardian
1950, 16mm, b&w/so, 11m, $30
Featuring Ann Halprin and Welland Lathrop; Photography, James Broughton; Music, William O. Smith.
Four poetic variations on the search for love; four odd characters living out their daydreams: Game Little Gladys, The Gardener's Son, Princess Printemps, and The Aging Balletomane. Based on Broughton's own poems, this film blends image, music and verse in moods from the farcical to the elegaic.
"Lovely and delicious, true cinematic poetry." - Dylan Thomas
"The best film poetry ever made." - Willard Maas
1951, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
Photography & poem, James Broughton; Music, Ralph Gilbert.
"This little slapstick comedy pictures the amorous progress of a prancing, baggy-trousered, bowler-hatted, demented and blissfully happy tramp who capers across a sunlit countryside making love to every woman he encounters. Half Rabelais, half Mack Sennet, LOONY TOM owes a great deal to the spirited miming of Kermit Sheets as the Happy Lover." - Paul Dehn, London Times
Awards: Edinburgh Film Festival; Venice Film Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival.
1951, 16mm, b&w/so, 10.5m, $30
A joyous musical fantasy celebrating Love in the Park and the victory of the pleasure principle over all prudes and killjoys. THE PLEASURE GARDEN was made in London with a professional cast and shot in the ruined gardens of the Crystal Palace.
"In Chaplin, Rene Clair, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati we enjoy on a big scale the fruits of the poetic turned comic. Broughton is of their kind, except that he holds more strongly to feeling, makes short cuts they daren't, sees and sings out of himself, and never dilutes a joke or a movement. THE PLEASURE GARDEN thus combines the pleasure of Keystone with the love lyric. It springs like the lark, and mingles oddity, grace, satire, and laughter without a dead moment." - Sight and Sound
"It's on the side of the angels. It's a great testimony for Love." - Allen Ginsberg
Awards: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1953; Cannes Film Festival, 1954.
1953, 16mm, b&w/so, 38m, $110
Camera, Bill Desloge; Music, Warner Jepson.
"One of the most lyrically erotic of independent films, THE BED is a merry allegory which celebrates impudently and imaginatively just about everything that could happen in bed (and some things that couldn't) - birth, young love, loneliness, dreams and death, amid all sorts of hanky-panky from fetishism to plain old lechery." - LA Free Press
"Broughton's finest film by far. It exists in a state of play fully realized." - Stan Brakhage
Awards: Oberhausen Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Yale Film Festival; Foothill College Film Festival.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
Photography, Stan Brakhage; Music, Lou Harrison.
This film celebrates weddings and being wed, and the union of opposites in everything everywhere. It is my alchemical testament to the mystery of Yang and Yin.
"With a strong feeling for the tension between wish and reality, NUPTIAE is a semi-home movie, beautifully casually photographed, about a mature couple who celebrate their wedding with a civil ceremony, a religious banquet, and a private beach ritual. Broughton's lucidity, even more than his lyricism, seems as much a function of what he sees as how he sees. Like all the best filmmakers, a love for reality makes him responsible, and he is tied to his world by bonds of gratitude." - Roger Greenspun, The New York Times
"One of Broughton's finest films." - P. Adams Sitney
Awards: First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1969; First Prize, Yale Film Festival, 1969.
1969, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $45
"A lovely, poetic, humorous and crystal investigation of mankind standing, sitting and lying down." - John Wasserman, San Francisco Chronicle
"James Broughton adroitly blends anatomical tableaus and pantomime, simulating everything from sexual harmony to plain everyday desk slump. The cast parades around in jaybird comfort. The picture is funny and ever so wise." - Howard Thompson, The New York Times
"A superb control of the cinema medium with a visual richness and an elegance approached by no other film viewed by the judges." - Bruce Conner, Maurice Girodias, Arthur Knight, First Erotic Film Festival
"THE GOLDEN POSITIONS is a rich, warm, clear statement of humanism. There is no angst, no fragmentation, no overt experimentation. It stands apart from most of the films of the past two decades by its feeling of certainty, positiveness, and completeness. And, most importantly, THE GOLDEN POSITIONS gives us a deep and restful pleasure in the viewing." - Sheldon Renan
Awards: Grand Prize, Bellevue Film Festival, 1970; First Prize, First Int'l Erotic Film Festival, 1970.
1970, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 32m, $90
"James Broughton's creation myth, THIS IS IT, places a 2-year-old Adam and a bright apple-red balloon in a backyard garden of Eden, and works a small miracle of the ordinary. And since that miracle is what his film is about, he achieves a kind of casual perfection in matching means and ends." - Robert Greenspun, The New York Times
"It's simple, inspired, and ecstatic. To watch Broughton's film you need a certain silence, a certain descending to the more subtle, more fragile levels of your being - otherwise, the film and its content will not reach you, it will break to pieces. I figure this is the main reason why films of the stature and subtlety and ecstasy of THIS IS IT never reach the New York Film Festival screen." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
"A seminal film that promises to affect the course of film art for some time to come." - Hollis Frampton
Awards: First Prize, Yale Film Festival, 1972; First Prize, Hawaii Int'l Film Festival, 1972; First Prize, Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1972; First Prize, Kenyon Film Festival, 1972.
1971, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
Photography, John Schofill, Fred Padula; Music, Morton Subotnick.
"DREAMWOOD is James Broughton's major work to date. It is a modern day spiritual odyssey in which a man is mysteriously compelled to leave his home and embark on a voyage to a strange and magical island. On the island he faces the most improbable and intense experiences of his life, ranging from total humiliation to a deep sense of oneness with the forces of life. Heroic in concept, subtle in execution, DREAMWOOD is a beautiful film by a true master of the medium." - David Bienstock
"DREAMWOOD is Broughton's finest film." - Jerome Hill
"No single film in the whole of the American avant-garde comes as close as this one to the source of the trance film, Cocteau's Blood of a Poet." - P. Adams Sitney
Awards: First Prize, Independent Filmmakers Festival, 1972; Foothill College Film Festival, 1972.
1972, 16mm, color/so, 45m, $135
"A visualization of the Zen dictum of 'sitting quietly, doing nothing,' HIGH KUKUS uses a single beautiful visual image while it delights with a poetic soundtrack composed of 14 gems of Broughton's wit and wonder." - Freude Bartlett
"A High Kuku is, of course, a cuckoo haiku. In inventing this form James Broughton has concocted zany verses which are 'high' in the sense that they are often metaphysical and are keenly aware of the metacomedy of things.... In the contemplation of lofty themes most people are serious, though not always sincere. Broughton, however, is always sincere but hardly ever serious. Indeed, seriousness is a questionable virtue; it is gravity rather than levity, and it was that devout Catholic, G.K. Chesterton, who maintained that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And, in company with the angels, Broughton laughs with God rather than at him." - Alan Watts
Award: First Prize, Bolinas Poetry Film Festival, 1975
1973, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
"TESTAMENT is James Broughton's exquisite self-portrait. A major figure in avant-garde filmmaking and poetry since the 1940s, Broughton views his life and life's work with irony, charm, humor, and a combination of joyous self-love and gentle self-depreciation. Scenes from his earlier films mix the elements of humor, magic, slapstick, melodrama, and romance which mark his aesthetic. A plethora of rich personal symbols is woven throughout the film, tied together by verbal games, Zen poems, anecdotes, songs, a child's prayer, dreams, and visions." - Karen Cooper
"James Broughton's TESTAMENT is one of the most remarkable films ever produced within the American independent cinema. It is the most moving and most sublimely detached of the recent trend of filmic autobiographies - by Jerome Hill, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Brakhage, to name only the masters, and Broughton's peers." - P. Adams Sitney
"A beautiful, important, mysterious work." - Amos Vogel
1974, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
Camera, H.E. Jenkins II; Harp, Joel Andrews.
An homage to Lao-Tzu, this is a rollicking joyful poem that celebrates the movement of the waterways of the world, set to music by Corelli and read by the poet. The image is a continuous flow of light on water.
"Exhilarating! It is Taoism alive." - Al Chung-liang Huang
1975, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
Camera, Robert Gaylord; Poem, James Broughton; Producer, Robert A. Haller for Pittsburgh Filmmakers.
The film travels in close-up over the mysterious terrains of nude human bodies as they touch and explore one another. It is like an expedition into human geography, an intimate sculpture, an erogenous healing ceremony, and an ode to the pleasures of touch. Also it is an homage to old friends, Willard Maas and Marie Menken, who made the first body poem in cinema history, Geography of the Body, in 1943.
Awards: Bellevue Film Festival, 1976; NY Film Exposition, 1977; American Film/Video Festival, 1977.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
"This is the secret that will not stay hidden/this secret that is no secret / Here is the wonder of the god in man / Here is the dangling flower of Eros."
So begins the poetry sequence on the soundtrack of this very intimate film.
HERMES BIRD is a celebration and an apotheosis of the masculine miracle: the transformative powers of the phallus, revealed as a phenomenon of glowing beauty and wonder.
Because the film occurs in extreme slow motion one has the opportunity to witness for the first time in cinema the delicate pulsations and tremors and changes of the penis as it grows erect, until at last, reaching outward and upward, it takes flight toward its climax. The filmmaker-poet has written a group of lyrical poems for the sound of the film. They are spoken by the poet, and they sing praises for the radiant masculine mystery of the "sacred firebird," the "holy acrobat shaped for surprise" which is every man's pride and, hopefully, his joy.
1979, 16mm, color/so, 11m, $30