Stan Brakhage Movies

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

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...

Phrases of Stephen Foster, set to music by Joel Heartling, are set to film in this autobiographical piece: a solitary female voice, occasionally...

A stand of birches. Sunlight brightens and dims, revealing more or less of the woods. A little grass is on the forest floor. Is there a shape in the...

Centuries of June, perhaps more than any Cornell film, is a naked attempt to capture the soul of a place and the mood of a disappearing moment.

A film photographed in Amsterdam but dedicated to capturing a quality of mind engendered there - not, certainly, alienation (as often in travel) but...

“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...

This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes...

Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of...

This, then, finishes eleven years of editing drawing on 30-some years of photography. I will surely work autobiographically again, but the modes of...

Reel #4 of (...) is a recapitulation of the primary variations of scratched (on black leader) shapes and additive colors (i.e. those which are...

This is the realization of a 30 year old dream, a wish of the young filmmaker to film a modern Faust which finally came to a fulfillment as...

A tribute to Stan Brakhage's pet dog Sirius, whose decompostion was recorded over 6 months after he had died. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive...

"A second 20-minute reel is more staccato mad chicken-scratch calligraphy fluttering out of a yellow void, sketchy lightning bolts or fireworks...

“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...

The "star", as it is singular, is the sun; and it is metaphored, at the beginning of this film, by the projector anyone uses to show forth. Then the...

This is the most formal of all these works. - S.B.

This is a hand-painted step-printed film which begins with slow dissolves of what appear to be decaying leaves, crumpled browns and golds and oranges...

"The third and shortest section reintroduces camera-derived imagery and, minimal as it may be (sunlight shimmering on water, seagull wheeling in the...

One of the few Brakhage films featuring spoken dialogue and a central character, this sly and bitter polemic pits an actor (poet? director?) against...