Stan Brakhage Trailers
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Stan Brakhage is one of the most influential filmmakers in American avant-garde cinema, noted for his unflinching social commentaries and technical innovations. Over his nearly 40-year career, he has made over 200 films of varying length. He made his first film, Interim (1952) at age 18 after dropping out of college. Brakhage films seek to change the way we see. They encourage viewers to eschew traditional narrative structure in favor of pure visual perception that is not reliant on naming what is seen; rather his goal is to create a more visceral visual experience, for he believes that a "stream-of visual-consciousness could be nothing less than the pathway of the soul." To this end, his films are shot in highly sensual colors and utilize minimal soundtracks.
His work can be divided into distinct periods. His first short films explored the properties and possibilities of light. In many of his experimental ventures, Brakhage has forgone traditional cinematography in favor of working directly with the film stock itself. He has occasionally painted, inked, scratched and dyed images onto it; he has also tried pasting organic objects on the film. His most famous example is the 1963 short Mothlight in which he glued moth wings onto the stock. Some of his early films were based on his most intimate experiences that included making love to his new bride--depicted on negative film--in Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959), and an attempt to bring his dead dog back to life with a camera in Sirius Remembered (1959). During the 1960s, Brakhage's iconoclastic views were celebrated for their poetry, but during the '70s, his focus changed to social issues and he alienated many supporters with such disturbing film series as the "Pittsburgh documents" in which he presented many gruesome views of inner city life with films such as Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971) which was shot in a morgue. He also continued with autobiographical material with the "Sincerity/Duplicity series. During the 1980s, Brakhage's focus again changed--this time he became intrigued with creating truly "abstract" films such as Arabics (1982) which consists of brilliant bursts of colored light which he claims, represent "envisioned music." In addition to filmmaking, Brakhage also wrote books about films and filmmaking and also served as a teacher.
Most Popular Stan Brakhage Trailers
Total trailers found: 430
16 December 2002
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".
01 January 1996
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.
01 January 1972
The film by Brakhage commonly referred to as "Wecht" does indeed exist. It doesn't have a titlecard at the head, and the leader of the original is labeled "Portrait" in Stan's handwriting, so I'm not sure where the 'Wecht' title comes from.
01 January 1978
In the autobiographical tradition of the earlier Sincerities, this film takes up the light-threads of our living 14 years ago when the Brakhage family found home and "settled," like they say, into some sense of permanence.
08 July 1997
Brakhage's lecture at the Whitney Museum is a thoughtful meditation on another friend and fellow filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos.
03 February 2004
In a voiceover Stan Brakhage articulates his resentments about the use of computers for art production and in general.
13 April 1984
While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
01 January 1998
Stan Brakhage shows his new films at MoMA in New York. Before that, he said hello to me, Jonas Mekas, Birgit, the Anthology team and others.
01 January 1996
Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century.
01 June 1997
A very personal lecture on filmmaker and friend Jim Davis.
01 January 1978
A decade and a half ago, poet Robert Kelly told me that the "crucial work" of our time might be what he calls "the dream work": I hope, with this Series, to have entertained his challenge more thoughtfully than with any previous "dream" filmmaking.
01 January 1983
"My moving-visual response to William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven & Hell," this hand-painted film seems the most rhythmically exact of all my work: it was inspired by memories of an old man coughing in the night of a thing-walled ancient hotel.
01 January 1999
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.
01 January 1996
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.
01 June 1990
"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.
15 June 1994
A year and a half ago the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted I must see the Chartres Cathedral.
02 January 1979
"The ecstatic, mythic montage of Alaskan landscapes" is also "about the act of making" and an antidote to the stodgy notion that life crawled forth from a warm primordial soup.
17 November 1964
A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born.
01 January 1989
This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein's "Stanzas In Meditation", in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes and human symbolism "indicative of that field-of-consciousness within which humanity survives thoughtfully.
01 January 1990
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 by seeking out imagery that evokes worlds we cannot see.
03 November 1989
Music by Rick Corrigan. This is the imaged thought process of young Faust escaping the unbearable pictures of his broken romantic idyll, mentally fleeing the particulars of his dramatized "love," Faust's mind ranging the geography of his upbringing and its structures of cultural hubris – the whole nervous system "going to ground" and finally "becoming one" with the hypnagogically visible cells of his receptive sight and inner cognition .
31 December 1959
A tribute to Stan Brakhage's pet dog Sirius, whose decompostion was recorded over 6 months after he had died.
01 January 1972
The Presence reflects some sight of Insect as Being. The Imagined aura and environment of a beetle creates a 'world' wherein this solitary insect may simply be seen.
22 December 1976
"This is taking a Super 8mm camera around with me wherever I go and I'm very interested in windows at this time of travel, and I'm trying to make a variety of different statements about the concept of window.
09 August 1993
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.
13 May 1963
Three TV "concretes."
09 August 1993
A hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to create varieties of tempo in mimic of sparking and molten rock.
01 March 1999
An exploration of film preservation and restoration in the United States.
01 January 1961
Featuring stylized visual storytelling, this rarely seen film by famed experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage was produced for the Colorado Department of Public Relations and is one of two films (the other being "Colorado Legend") to explore Colorado myths.
22 December 1970
“After wishing for years to be given the opportunity of filming some of the more “mystical” occupations of our Times – which the average imagination turns into “bogeyman”… viz: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.
25 December 1976
Mid-period Brakahge short. "Haiku cartoons."
01 May 1969
This film celebrates weddings and being wed, and the union of opposites in everything everywhere.
01 January 1968
SONG 26: a conversation piece–a viz-a-visual, inspired by the (e)motional properties of talk: drone, bird-like twitterings, statement terror, & bombast (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
24 June 1993
Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their own experiments in the field of visionary filmmaking.
04 March 2001
This lush, sensuous film is based on paintings of unusual variety and intricacy. Brakhage's desire to include all the complexities of living in his work is evident in this "love song.
01 January 1974
'A loosely coiled length of yarn (story) ... wound on a reel' -- my parenthesis! This is a painted film (inspired by unpainted pictures): 'skins' of paint hung in a weave of light.
22 April 1967
SONGS 24 & 25: A naked boy and flute song; a being about nature (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
22 April 1967
SONGS 24 & 25: A naked boy and flute song; a being about nature (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
26 December 1976
The following films were all made in 1976. I do not wish to describe them. (S.B.) "Has aspects of the diary film.
01 January 1994
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).
31 May 2003
Stan Brakhage's final film, made shortly before his death by wetting a filmstrip with saliva and using his fingernail to scratch marks into the emulsion.
31 December 1960
"The Dead became my first work in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential.
01 January 1957
These two films investigate frustrations in loving, DAYBREAK with a girl as object, WHITEYE with the camera as subject.
20 April 1966
SONGS 21 & 22: Two views of closed-eye vision (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
01 January 1996
"This film is a collaboration between Joel Haertling and Stan Brakhage. It is a hand-painted film incorporating treated film images of trees in Fall colors and scratched film.
01 January 1971
This is then the property of many angels.
01 January 1987
This documentary, made seven years after the death of legendary filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye, tells Lye's story: from being a young boy staring at the sun, to travels around the Pacific and life in New York.
01 January 1995
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.
20 March 1964
SONG 7: San Francisco (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
01 January 1975
Begins with back of airplane seat, ends with horizontal streaks of bold light.
01 January 1980
An imagery sharp as stars and hard as the thought-universe (turning back upon itself) absorbed in gentle patterns of contemplation.
01 January 1957
In Loving (1957), a couple make love in the sun and their optic system flares -- it's really the nervous system's ecstasy -- in oranges and yellows and whites.
19 September 1971
I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUX EX.
03 September 1965
SONG 13: A travel song of scenes and horizontals (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
01 March 1965
SONG 10: Sitting around (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
01 January 1969
SONG 29: A portrait of the artist's mother (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
01 January 1969
Song 28: Scenes as texture (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
27 March 1981
"after + math (((mowing, crop))) a second growth crop" ... this my strongest attack on pop culture, the movies, TV, etc.
20 April 1966
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 Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
12 April 2003
Filmed April 12, 2003 at a benefit concert held at and for The Anthology Film Archives, the international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of avant-garde and independent cinema.
