Stan Brakhage Movies

A look at the inner workings of a hospital. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2011.

part of the Preludes series (1996)

The last of Brakhage's longer works. Part of the "Vancouver Island" films.

This is a hand-painted work whose shapes are scratched on black leader filled with varieties of color: the resultant shapes tend to suggest...

This film evolves from several years’ observation of the sexual energy which charges the world of business and the qualities of palatial...

Section Ill is the most abstract section of the four, and the only one which does not contain old photographic material. The means used in previous...

Hungarian home movies are examined by the likes of James Ellroy and Stan Brakhage for evidence of family problems.

Prelude 19 begins with hand-painted swatches of variable colors encompassed eventually by vertical strokes of reds and blues, followed by sudden...

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...

This way madness - or experimental filmmaking - lies. A solitary man in coat and tie enters an apartment. It's midnight. He appears agitated and...

Clip from Walden.

LOVESONG 2 is a rapid recapitulation of the tactics of Lovesong, without the multiple rhythms of variable step-printing: it is a straight...

Experimental, paint on celluloid

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...

"Firstly, I revealed in salutary confession the secret filth of my misdeed, which had long been festering in stagnant silence; and I made it my...

"Twigs" of color in space, and pure white "ghosts" of them in the background interspersed with dark amalgams of these and conglomerate forms. The...

Singly-printed criss-crosses of molten "brush"-(hard-edge)-strokes of black over pebbled yellow, ending finally on an intermix of all intertwined...

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...

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....

Image-by-image study of the Arapaho summit, in all seasons for two years; the clouds and the climate that carve this place in the landscape (the...