Film Categories: cameraless

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 partial use of painted frames in repetition (for “close-up” of textures). The tone of the film is primarily dark blue, and the paint is composed (and rephotographed microscopically) to suggest galactic forms in a space of stars.

The title is almost the whole of any possible description of this hand-painted and photographically step-printed film which exhibits variably shaped small areas of colour (in a dark field) which explode into full frames of textured colour interwoven with scratch patterns that create a considerable sense of interior depth and three-dimensional movement. (SB)

This film is a series of five little hand-painted and elaborately step-printed sections which are individually titled but so inter-related I’ve decided they should always be shown in this order together, but each such a distinction of the essentially un-nameable subject matter they variously facet that they should retain the character of individual pieces within their shared context … a context I’ve attempted to represent by a small “b” for my name “Brakhage.” The film begins with Old Testament, a two-and-a-half minute historical section titled RETROSPECT: THE PASSOVER and its evolution of forms is meant to suggest the Biblical story…

This is 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 (which is, in the repetitive form of the whole film, only fleetingly seen) – a trysting place which flits through the mind like a ghost. (SB) Note: Must be rented with “The Harrowing”; rental price covers both films.

(Dedicated to Doug Edwards) All titles dominate linguistically: in that sense, any film would be better left unnamed. This little handpainted work attempts to BE a visual “flowering,” and as it is (as Film is) a continuity art, it would seek some visual corollary of the whole growth process (root, stem, leaves, blue sky and the blood-gold growth of the meat/mind-electricity of the film-maker) – but without mimic of either flower or thought process… clear thru to film’s clear “blossoming” in the passage of light.

This is a hand-painted work which involves a variety of colours applied within gouged and scratched shapes which approximate both swift shifts of bird-shape (legs, beaks and feather-spreads especially) and the Bird of Paradise flower-form as well, the former tending to metamorphize into the latter across the course of the work.