Film Format: 16mm

After wishing for years to be given the opportunity of filming some of the more “mystical” occupations of our Times – some of the more obscure Public Figures which the average imagination turns into “bogeyman” … viz: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.: – I was at last permitted to ride in a Pittsburgh police car, camera in hand, the final several days of September 1970 – this opportunity due largely to the efforts of a Pittsburgh newspaper photographer, Mike Chikaris – who was sympathetic to my film show at the Carnegie Institute and responded to my wish as stated on…

The “Dynamo theories” of Henry Adams portrayed in first person/sexual vision: an American businessman as lord of all he surveys.

An episode, complete in itself, excerpted from “Gravity is Not Sad, But Glad,” this film consists of a series of flipbooks. The contents of the flipbooks offer comments on aspects of history, culture and the nature of seeing.

This, the second film of the continuing autobiographical “Duplicity” series, is composed of superimpositions much as the mind “dupes” remembered experience into some semblance of, say, composed surety rather than imbalanced accuracy – as thought may even warp “scene” into symmetry, or face into multitudinous mask. What will have been becomes what will be being. I’ve tried to “give the lie” to this genesis of all white-lying. (Stan Brakhage)

“A bold attempt, full of visual sensibility, to use living animals, unconscious of their roles, as abstract counters in a tone poem of color and chiaroscuro.” – Parker Tyler

“HER” to me is always Jane, in the first place, but also Hera: “goddess of women and marriage,” naturally enough. Then, too, as it is a hymn of light, and as he/me feels the self that way, it sings of and to itself. (SB)

Two short films, the first NOT about purity itself, whatever that might be, but rather an equivalent of the process of searching for purity in the mind … the second film, then, thought’s rebound from that. (SB)

This film, one of the most perfect it has ever been given to me to make, was inspired by the series of paintings of the same title by Edward Hicks. (SB)

1: SUN 2: not cap: GOLD – used in alchemy 3: the sun-god of the ancient Romans; but then also, as I understand it, a French word for earth, wherefrom we get our “sail”; and then (puns always intended, as I hear them): soul …. This also, then, a tone poem film. (SB)