Film Format: 16mm

  • Lovesong #3 & 4

    Lovesong #3 Three qualities of hand-painted imagery inter-weave throughout this film: (1) a mash of thick lines delineating colored shapes, (2) thin black lines, like drawings, which most suggest recognizable body-parts, and (3) globs of pure color at interplay with each other. An irregularity of rhythm (produced by repetition of frames 2,3,and 4 times) creates the sense of a driving force propelling the inter-weave of these essentially abstract displays: three-fourths of the way through the rhythmic intensity falters, “brakes down” as it were, almost becomes a mockery of its earlier sexual regularity. Instead of a variety midst regular beat, the…

  • Two Found Objects of Charles Boultenhouse

    A thin oval of green-tinged light in thick darkness persists, then gradually descends below the bottom of the frame and, after a pause, rises again to its original position. Out of the surrounding darkness a figure slowly emerges, a woman in a purple robe who moves with stately steps back and forth across the screen, finally fully apparent in the “line” (or circle) of light. She throws off her robe and appears in her white shift, lies prone upon the floor, then rises into a dance of rhythmic postures which subside to a kneeling and bound-down position from which she…

  • Cabbages and Kings

    A dramatic presentation of an alcoholic’s dead-end existence in a small Ontario town. The film shifts confidently between subjective, impressionistic footage – detailing the man’s desperate wanderings in an industrial landscape and fleeting glimpses of impending death – and realistic “documentary” material of his drunken parties, encounters with down-and-out “friends” and run-ins with institutional authorities. The film is strengthened immeasurably by the performances Duffy has drawn from his “actors” – alcoholics who worked closely with him to recreate their own situations. A tightly knit, thought-provoking film which carries a strong emotional impact.

  • In Between

    Portrait of Jesse Collins: a daydream nightmare in the surrealist tradition. Music by John Cage.

  • Shockingly Hot

    This little hand-painted film was over-a-year in the making, and absolutely dependent upon a quality of “broad-stroke” in the painting which I think only children really capable of achieving, at least insofar as such stroke can approximate flame. These strokes/flames had, then, to be chopped back to the frame, in order to exist meaningfully on film. They had to be so timed as to epitomize the relentless of fire, so toned that fiery ice would be included in the aesthetic. (SB) (Thanks to Anton and Vaughn Brakhage.)

  • Domain of the Moment 1, 2, 3 & 4, The

    Here are four films in contemplation upon those events, which are so centered upon one moment that chronology seems almost obliterated or at least unimportant in remembrance. Most animals seem, to me, to inhabit this eventuality as a norm. I was permitted to share such experience, camera in hand, with several creatures these four non-times; but it was the memory of those experiences which made it possible to edit a formal equivalent for the continuity art of film. (Stan Brakhage)

  • Soldiers and Other Cosmic Objects

    This begins the fourth chapter of “The Book of Film” and entertains directly the considerations of chapter two (“THE WEIR-FaLCON SAGA,” “The Machine of Eden,” and “The Animals of Eden and After”). Person begins to be defined by what it is not. It might be said that chapter one (“Scenes from Under Childhood”) set forth birth and being, chapter two – consciousness, chapter three (“Sincerity”) – self-consciousness; thus “Soldier and Other Cosmic Objects” begins that strictly philosophical task of distinguishing (from, in this case, the rituals and trials of public school). I like to think of it as a work…

  • Silent Song

    “Silent Song” brings new life to a remarkable piece of 1945 footage found by chance in an archive. “Silent Song” completes a deeply personal trilogy on family history and Holocaust memory. The first two films of the trilogy, “Zyklon Portrait” (13min. 1999) and “The Walnut Tree” (11min. 2000) have been seen in 20 countries around the globe, garnering numerous awards. In the pandemonium of the liberation of Nazi concentration camp Dachau, a U.S. army cameraman filmed a young boy playing the accordian. This strangely poetic moment offers an unusual contrast to the all-too-familiar WWII liberation images of emaciated prisoners in…

  • Wonder Ring, The

    On a theme suggested by Joseph Cornell. A sharp change in Brakhage’s work, we see New York’s Third Avenue EI (since demolished) as though through the eyes of a child on a merry-go-round.

  • Zone Moment

    This, an early work which I had assumed destroyed, was discovered in 1995 (by someone who wishes to remain anonymous) and thus is available for “tone poem” time-travel to the ‘50s. (SB)