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Mothlight
1963 • Animation
Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar t…
Why matched: genres Animation
Night Music
1986 • Animation
Part of Three Hand-Painted Films, Night Music (originally painted on IMAX) attempts to capture the beauty of sadness, as the eyes have it when closed in meditation on sorrow.
Why matched: genres Animation
Wedlock House: An Intercourse
1959 • Romance
We see a film negative of a nude couple embracing in bed. Then, back in regular black and white images, we see them alone and together, clothed, at home. It's night, she sees hi…
Why matched: genres Romance
Prelude: Dog Star Man
1962 • Drama • Fantasy
A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and…
Why matched: genres Drama, Fantasy
Kindering
1987
Refracted images, not unlike those in a funhouse mirror, display two children playing in a backyard, a boy and a girl. There's a dog, a swing, a picket fence, a Big Wheels trike…
Why matched: semantic similarity
Cat's Cradle
1959
Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work with their hands, occasionally…
Why matched: semantic similarity
Desistfilm
1954 • Drama
Four young men and a young woman sit in boredom. She smokes while one strums a lute, one looks at a magazine, and two fiddle with string. The door opens and in comes a young man…
Why matched: genres Drama
Dog Star Man
1965 • Fantasy
Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.
Why matched: genres Fantasy
Window Water Baby Moving
1959 • Documentary
On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and hi…
Why matched: genres Documentary
Blue Moses
1962
One of the few Brakhage films featuring spoken dialogue and a central character, this sly and bitter polemic pits an actor (poet? director?) against an unseen audience. Preserv…
Matched on: Brakhage
Thigh Line Lyre Triangular
1961 • Documentary
Only at a crisis do I see both the scene as I've been trained to see it ( that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic–colors as we've been trained to call a c…
Why matched: genres Documentary
Study in Color and Black and White
1993
A hand-painted and photographically step-printed film, which exhibits variably shaped small areas of color (in a dark field) that explode into full frames of textured color inte…
Why matched: semantic similarity
Persian Series #2
1999
Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, almost black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script. Preserved by the A…
Why matched: semantic similarity
Eye Myth
1967 • Animation
After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures…
Why matched: genres Animation
Persian Series #1
1999
This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes interspersed by darkness, then becomes l…
Why matched: semantic similarity
Crack Glass Eulogy
1991
A nostalgic envisionment of city living - the potential shards of memory seen as if always on the verge of cutting the mind to pieces.
Why matched: semantic similarity
The Dante Quartet
1987 • Animation
A visual representation, in four parts, of one man's internalization of "The Divine Comedy." Hell is a series of multicolored brush strokes against a white background; the speed…
Why matched: genres Animation
The Process
1972
This film by Stan Brakhage investigates the process of memory and thought by melting a series of images and a field of color. The positive-negative flickering graphs a sort of…
Matched on: Brakhage
Black Ice
1994 • Animation
Inspired by a bad fall on a patch of black ice (that ultimately resulted in Brakhage's need for eye surgery), the filmmaker gives us something of a dreamlike descent through the…
Matched on: Brakhage
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes
1972 • Documentary
At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. "S. Brakhage, entering, WITH HIS CAMERA, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, t…
Matched on: Brakhage