Stan Brakhage Movies

Brakhage's frame-by-frame hand carvings and etchings directly into the film emulsion, sometimes photographically combined with paint, are illuminated...

SONGS 17 & 18: The movie house cathedral and a singular room (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker...

This hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which...

The last of Brakhage's longer works. Part of the "Vancouver Island" films. "Purple flashes are followed by a curtain of purple and blues, first...

A very personal lecture on filmmaker and friend Jim Davis.

"This film rises out of my struggle to photograph the ephemeral qualities of varied air (as many Greek philosophers experienced such) and to arrange...

A collage of two-dimensional images of vegetation, each appearing only for a moment, sometimes as a single image, more often with other bits of stem,...

Three TV "concretes."

Hand painting, dye treatments and direct collage edited into 'themes and variations' that tell 'a thousand and one' stories. - Stan Brakhage

Inspired in part by a dream he had of murdering his mother, Brakhage here gives us one of his profoundest meditations on human aggression.

Brakhage begins here with Carlsbad Caverns as a stand-in for Plato's Cave and then responds to the philosopher's notion of inaccessible ideal forms...

This hand-painted work presents the semblance of a dark brown wall, ripped open and pocked with yellowed visions of rooms and other interiors,...

This is the twelfth film in the twenty-part Arabics series. Brakhage creates blurry visual fields that are profoundly without ground, worlds of...

1: SUN 2: not cap: GOLD - used in alchemy 3: the sun-god of the ancient Romans; but then also, as I understand it, a French word for earth, wherefrom...

It was while studying this film that I decided to group these ‘romans’ under the title Roman Numeral Series and to give up the term...

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...

Phos equals light, but then I did also want that word within the title which would designate place, as within the nationalities of "the fabulous" - a...

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set...

Brakhage's lecture at the Whitney Museum is a thoughtful meditation on another friend and fellow filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos.