Stan Brakhage Movies

From a murky landscape, a wooded mountain emerges. We watch the sun. We see a bearded man climbing up the mountain through the snow. He carries an...

A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images...

Four superimposed rolls of hand-painted and bi-packed television negative imagery are edited so as to approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the...

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...

This film is a mix of landscape images seen from train windows and the patterned shapes and shifting tones of moving-visual-thought thus prompted; it...

First person view of a man, seen only in shadow, attempting to connect with the world around him. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Comingled Containers is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage. "This 'return to photography' (after several years of only painting film) was...

This hand-painted work is easily the most minutely detailed ever given to me to do, for it traces (as best I'm able) the hypnagogic after-effect of...

A few major discoveries have been made in the collection, including that of three films that Stan had made for public television in 1962, unseen ...

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's...

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...

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

In this haunting but lyrical meditation on war, Brakhage intercuts 8-mm footage of Colorado with imagery from WWII newsreels. He responds to the...

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...

Two portraits in relation to each other, the first of Robert Creeley, the second of Michael McClure. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

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...

This way madness - or experimental filmmaking - lies. A solitary man in coat and tie enters an apartment. It's midnight. He appears agitated and...

This film, photographed in London, is an exploration into the depths of unconscious reactions.

"The Dead became my first work in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic...

Stan Brakhage's final film, made shortly before his death by wetting a filmstrip with saliva and using his fingernail to scratch marks into the...