Stan Brakhage Movies

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely...

Heading through Colorado Territory in search of gold and women, Alferd Packer and his group of bemused companions find themselves lost, starving and...

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.

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...

At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film...

This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with streaks of light and vibrantly colored forms. There appears, frame center, the tapered shape of a...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an...

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

Maya Deren is a legend of avant-garde cinema. This authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker, poet and anthropologist features excerpts...

Section Ill is the most abstract section of the four, and the only one which does not contain old photographic material. The means used in previous...

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...

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...

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...

In Loving (1957), a couple make love in the sun and their optic system flares -- it's really the nervous system's ecstasy -- in oranges and yellows...