Film Categories: cameraless

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.)

This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with several seconds of blank white (interrupted by red and brief electric yellow) and then proceeds to multiply flecked earth & rock shapes and root-like forms which seem to suck horizontally inward and upward midst phosphorescent greens and blues increasingly flecked with light-yellows giving way to tree-top branch likenesses taking oblique shape against phosphor sky.

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 psychological cathexis as designed by Freud in his first (and unfinished) book on the subject – “Toward a Scientific Psychology.” (SB)

Brakhage describes “Water for Maya” as “a hand-painted work which came into being during a film interview with Martina Kulacek about Maya Deren. There was a sudden recognition of Maya’s intrinsic love of water and thus of all Mayan liquidity in magic conjunction, reflection, etc.”

This, painted in the hospital while recovering from cancer surgery in 1996, is – it seems to me – very related to De Kooning’s Alzheimer’s paintings. The mind, here, is seeking a “blank” and/or holding fast to tendrils of meaning which are stripped so bare as to be purely reflective of flesh tissue and irregular strands of cells. (Stan Brakhage)

“Beautiful Funerals” is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of : 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes; 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black “brushstrokes” and hard-edge straight black-and-white lines. Finally there is a brilliant pinkish flare veined with curled blue lines which engenders a resolution between these (above described) alternating modes – colours in the straight-line sections, lines among the artifice of “flowers,” a kind of dark lattice-form which knits the two modes, gray and coloured “clouds” which correlate them.