Genres

The story of Stan Brakhage's CHINESE SERIES is both a somewhat sad and yet an incredibly beautiful one. After having retired from teaching and moving to Vancouver, Canada, Brakhage began work on a "dream-project" of sorts, a series of film's to be made completely by scratching into the film emulsion, as he had successfully done so many times previous with eloquent and visually captivating results; this was to be the CHINESE SERIES. But the filmmaker was taken once again by his battle with debilitatingly-painful terminal cancer and, as such, was unable to complete the film by the time of his death. As a final wish he asked his wife to release ...

American avant garde experimental film maker, concerned more with technique than subject matter. He filmed many short subjects on 8mm or 16mm film. He often used blurred or out-of-focus shots, superimposed or distorted images, intentionally designed to emphasize subjectivity of vision.

Though his film were rarely seen outside the experimental film community, there is one bit of film that Brakhage is supposed to have made that practically everyone in America has seen -- the original shot of a Downy fabric softener bottle falling in slow motion into a plump pile of towels.

Though his film were rarely seen outside the experimental film community, there is one bit of film that Brakhage is supposed to have made that practically everyone in America has seen -- the original shot of a Downy fabric softener bottle falling in slow motion into a plump pile of towels.

American avant garde experimental film maker, concerned more with technique than subject matter. He filmed many short subjects on 8mm or 16mm film. He often used blurred or out-of-focus shots, superimposed or distorted images, intentionally designed to emphasize subjectivity of vision.

American avant garde experimental film maker, concerned more with technique than subject matter. He filmed many short subjects on 8mm or 16mm film. He often used blurred or out-of-focus shots, superimposed or distorted images, intentionally designed to emphasize subjectivity of vision.

Though his film were rarely seen outside the experimental film community, there is one bit of film that Brakhage is supposed to have made that practically everyone in America has seen -- the original shot of a Downy fabric softener bottle falling in slow motion into a plump pile of towels.

Brakhage intended on removing the soundtrack for this section after all four parts were finished, though he ultimately did not. To view this as Brakhage intended, it is recommended to disable the audio track. We left the audio in for completeness though.

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 shadows? Something green is out of focus. The light flashes, and the screen goes dark from time to time. We look up close at the bark of trees. Is the god of the forest to be seen?

American avant garde experimental film maker, concerned more with technique than subject matter. He filmed many short subjects on 8mm or 16mm film. He often used blurred or out-of-focus shots, superimposed or distorted images, intentionally designed to emphasize subjectivity of vision

We see a film negative of a nude couple embracing in bed. Then, back in regular black and white images, we see them alone and together, clothed, at home. It's night, she sees his reflection in the window, she closes the drapes. After sex, again in a black and white negative, they sit, smoke, have coffee. They kiss, she smiles. They light candles. The images are often quick, the camera angles occasionally are off kilter; the room is sometimes dark and sometimes lit, as if lit by the rotating of a searchlight. The images again appear in negative when they return to bed.

Though this film were rarely seen outside the experimental film community, there is one bit of film that Brakhage is supposed to have made that practically everyone in America has seen -- the original shot of a Downy fabric softener bottle falling in slow motion into a plump pile of towels.

American avant garde experimental film maker, concerned more with technique than subject matter. He filmed many short subjects on 8mm or 16mm film. He often used blurred or out-of-focus shots, superimposed or distorted images, intentionally designed to emphasize subjectivity of vision.

A visual representation, in four parts, of one man's internalization of "The Divine Comedy." Hell is a series of multicolored brush strokes against a white background; the speed of the changing images varies. "Hell Spit Flexion," or springing out of Hell, is on smaller film stock, taking the center of the frame. Montages of color move rapidly with a star and the edge of a lighted moon briefly visible. Purgation is back to full frame; blurs of color occasionally slow down then freeze. From time to time, an image, such as a window or a face, is distinguishable for a moment. In "existence is song," colors swirl then flash in and out of view. Beh...

American avant garde experimental film maker, concerned more with technique than subject matter. He filmed many short subjects on 8mm or 16mm film. He often used blurred or out-of-focus shots, superimposed or distorted images, intentionally designed to emphasize subjectivity of vision

Stan Brakhage, 1980-1990 • Murder Psalm is mainly comprised of found footage, in particular an educational film about an epileptic. As Brakhage moves her through a variety of settings, violence and horror seem to erupt from all sides. The transformative power of light is here abandoned, exiled by the terrible illusions and half-truths of mass culture. Its opposite, City Streaming, transforms Toronto into a dwelling place of illumination itself. Brakhage ‘sings’ the city as fields of brilliance whose only meaning is their own existence, and which could not exist anywhere else. Also in the program: Unconscious London Strata; The Loom. 16mm

Stan Brakhage described his film as "a hand-painted visualization of sex in the mind's eye". My mind finds little that could be called erotic, but much that is visually sensuous. In part, that is due to his painting techniques here, as many of the individual images are strongly crackled or impastoed and apparently photographed still wet, so that the paint glistens in the changing light. Additionally, the rate of image change is much slower than usual with him. Rather than the expected 12-24 images per second, here we see 2 or 3 per second and have more time to enjoy the abstract shapes and the rotation of rich colors through the palette. Shou...

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 picket fence, a Big Wheels trike. The grass is green and lush. A soundtrack mixes a chorus, swelling strings, and a child vocalizing. The effect is to idealize the images.

"The production of nervous force is directly connected with the diet of an individual, and its refining depends on the very purity of this diet, allied to appropriate breathing exercises.The diet most calculated to act effectively on the nervous force is that which contains the least quantity of animal matter; therefore the Pythagorean diet, in this connection, is the most suitable.