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Flesh of Morning (1956)
Character: N/A
Short B/W film about the textures of the human skin and household objects, showing Brakhage in the morning as reality distorts around him. Revised in 1986.
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Song 1 (1964)
Character: N/A
SONG 1: Portrait of a lady (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
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Trumpit (1956)
Character: N/A
Featuring a card game played on the body of a naked woman, Lawrence Jordan portrays male sexual frustration while slyly satirizing Hollywood reaction shots.
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Garden Path (2001)
Character: N/A
A depiction of the creative process of hand-painting film giant, Stan Brakhage. Inspired by Monet's paintings from Giverny, Brakhage's luminous abstract painting transforms the screen into an oneiric botanical landscape. Brakhage's painted loops leap out of black and white footage of the master at work, painting and printing.
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As Is Was (1995)
Character: N/A
This film was shot the same weekend as Z (Zee Not Zed), when Stan Brakhage was visiting University of Rhode Island, where Marjorie Keller was teaching at the time. They get some coffee, then go for a walk on a beach in an old whaling harbor.
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The One Romantic Venture of Edward (1956)
Character: N/A
The young man, played by Stan Brakhage, gets himself into a seriously comic mix-up by indulging in semi-sexual fantasies, and allowing the fantasies to take over. This is the best of my very early films and includes my first footage.
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Filmmakers (1969)
Character: Himself
Iimura creates a short self-portrait as well as brief portraits of five of his peers: Brakhage, Vanderbeek, Smith, Mekas and Warhol. In each portrait, Iimura attempts to copy the styles and traits of each artist (Vanderbeek's constantly moving camera; Mekas' experiments with film speed; Warhol's use of flashes of white against a black background), while briefly commenting on the images being shown. The film serves effectively as an introduction to the film styles of these artists.
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Keeping an Eye on Stan (2003)
Character: N/A
The late, legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage is the subject of this video portrait by his friends Ken Jacobs and Nisi Jacobs.The video closely documents Brakhage's last visit to New York, and captures scenes of his family life in Boulder, Colorado, affording a view of the artist that is at once candid and casual.
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Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability (2004)
Character: Voice
In a voiceover Stan Brakhage articulates his resentments about the use of computers for art production and in general. This comment is contrasted by video imagery turning more and more abstract until it bursts into a sea of square pixels. The video is an ironic illustration of Brakhage's views as these "defunct" images reveal a kind of beauty of their own.
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Legendary Epics Yarns and Fables Part 2: Stan Brakhage (1969)
Character: Himself
This film is a limited portrait of Stan Brakhage. The subject attempts to describe the experience that he is involved in by means of immediately responding to the aural and visual stimuli which surround and affect him. Brakhage involves the viewer in the subjective experience of the space in which he is seated, the camera, lights and technicians which created the experiential process. He further extends the parameters of the film's scope through the interjection of real or possibly apparent silence. -S.G., from The Film-makers' Coop
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Encomium (2003)
Character: Self
I shot this roll of film at a party Bard College threw when it awarded Stan Brakhage an honorary degree. A few days after he died, I dug it out and watched it again. I had meant to make Brakhage a gift of the roll, but instead it became a farewell.
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Sonic Youth: Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui (April 12, 2003) (2003)
Character: Self (archive footage)
Filmed April 12, 2003 at a benefit concert held at and for The Anthology Film Archives, the international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of avant-garde and independent cinema. In addition to screening films for the public, AFA houses a film museum, research library and art gallery. The event, which raised money for the Archives and celebrated the life and work of avant-garde film maker Stan Brakhage, featured Sonic Youth providing an improvised instrumental collaboration with silent Brakhage’s films. The band performed with drummer/percussionist Tim Barnes (Essex Green, Jukeboxer, Silver Jews).
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Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages (2022)
Character: N/A
This very special film features a carefully curated selection of some of the priceless messages that have graced Anthology’s voicemail system over the years. From the historically important to the utterly (and sublimely) absurd, they feature a cast of characters ranging from legendary avant-garde filmmakers, scholars, and other cultural figures to civilians whose legend has (until now) been confined to the offices of Anthology, thanks precisely to their witty, eloquent, eccentric – or in some cases unforgettably psychotic – voicemails. We’ve toyed with the idea of sharing these messages in some form for years, and the “Imageless Films” series provides a perfect pretext.
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I Met Stan Brakhage (At Moma, N.Y.C) (1998)
Character: N/A
Stan Brakhage shows his new films at MoMA in New York. Before that, he said hello to me, Jonas Mekas, Birgit, the Anthology team and others. Later, we return home by metro.
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Dinner with Brakhage and Gamow (2008)
Character: N/A
In 1958 R. Igor Gamow first met Jane Brakhage. Peter Garrity, in his new documentary film, "Dinner with Brakhage and Gamow" follows their life long friendship and, of course, the resulting deep friendships of their two extended families. In 1960 George and Igor Gamow and Stan Brakhage initiated a dialogue in an attempt to understand, on many different levels, the schism that existed and still exists between the Arts and the Sciences. These discussions occurred, often at dinner, continued for the some 50 years
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Life with Stan #4: Stan Painting (2002)
Character: N/A
This afternoon summer scene is very much how he worked (when painting directly on film) in the last several years – at various cafes and sports bars (usually indoors) on Pearl Street in Boulder (Boulder Blues and Pearls and…), amidst his taco salads, root beer floats, or Irish coffees…
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BRAKHAGE ON BRAKHAGE (1996)
Character: self
Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy.
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Brakhage by Mothlight (2016)
Character: Self (voice)
"Stan Brakhage’s films explode with sensual beauty: bursts of color heightened by extreme contrasts in hue and shape and by stunning depth effects; more monochromatic passages of nonetheless equal intensity that sensitize one to the glories of tiny differences; nearly flat, slowly changing fields of color that wave like blankets in the wind, only to be interrupted by a cut that opens up a vast space; rapid explosions of paint that seem just on the cusp of suggesting a nameable object. The viewer is taken through such complexities of experience that the effect is a little like having one’s eyes flushed out." Fred Camper (2010)
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Watunna (1989)
Character: Narrator
The creation myths of the Yekuana Indians of the Orinoco region of Venezuela provide a transparent look at the poetic process by which human beings construct meaning from their experience. Narrated by Stan Brakhage. Music and sound by Bruce Odland.
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Faust's Other: An Idyll (1988)
Character: N/A
“Faust Part 2” reveals the modern Faust in a romantic interlude, an idyll (from the Greek idein, "to see"); also, a journey of the id. A sense of story is inferred through the complex interweaving of human gesture, expression, and bodily movement within vibrantly shifting colours and rhythmic development, creating multiple levels of metaphorical meaning. A collaborative work with paintings by Emily Ripley and soundtrack by Joel Haertling.
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Im Spiegel der Maya Deren (2002)
Character: Himself
Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.
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Grand Opera: An Historical Romance (1979)
Character: Himself (voice)
Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.
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Brakhage (1998)
Character: Self
BRAKHAGE explores the depth and breadth of the filmmaker’s genius, the exquisite splendor of his films, his magic personal charm, his aesthetic fellow travelers, and the influence his work has had on generations of other creators. While touching on significant moments in Brakhage’s biography, the film celebrates Brakhage’s visionary genius, and explores the extraordinary artistic possibilities of cinema, a medium mostly known only for its commercial applications in the form of narratives, cartoons, documentaries, and advertising. BRAKHAGE combines excerpts from Brakhage’s films and films of other avant-garde filmmakers (eg, George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Willie Varela, Bruce Elder, and others); interviews with Brakhage, his friends, family, colleagues, and critics; archival footage of Brakhage spanning the past thirty-five years; and location shooting in Boulder, Colorado and New York.
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For Stan (2009)
Character: Himself
For Stan is a tribute film shot by Marilyn Brakhage of her husband at work with his camera in the late 1980s and early 90s – illuminating their close relationship.
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Vakvagany (2002)
Character: Himself
Hungarian home movies are examined by the likes of James Ellroy and Stan Brakhage for evidence of family problems.
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Doodlin': Impressions Of Len Lye (1987)
Character: Self
This documentary, made seven years after the death of legendary filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye, tells Lye's story: from being a young boy staring at the sun, to travels around the Pacific and life in New York. It includes excerpts from many of his films, and interviews with second wife Ann and biographer Roger Horrocks. Len Lye himself is often heard, outlining his ideas of the ‘old brain’ and how Māori and Aboriginal art influenced his work. The grandeur of his ideas are only matched by their scale, with steel sculptures designed to be "at least 20 foot high".
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Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box (1991)
Character: Self
This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.
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Jonas in the Desert (1994)
Character: Self
Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a journey through the world of the artist Jonas Mekas - one of the exponents of independent U.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive.
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Looking at Forest of Bliss (2000)
Character: Himself
Director Robert Gardner and legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage share an in-depth viewing of Gardner's ethnographic masterwork, Forest of Bliss. The film is shown in its entirety, with Gardner occasionally pausing to elucidate, and Brakhage brilliantly observing tonality, poetic imagery, life, death, the unconscious, and, well, just being damned insightful. - dred
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A Visit to Stan Brakhage (2006)
Character: N/A
In late 1966 I visited Stan Brakhage in Rollinsville, Colorado. This is a portrait of Stan at home, with his family, his animals, and the surroundings, 9000 feet high.
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Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema” (1973)
Character: N/A
During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.
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Reflecting Thought: Stan Brakhage (1985)
Character: Self
Stan Brakhage is a film maker whose work is shown mainly at film festivals. His work has been likened to poetry. Brakhage explains his techniques and his motivation.
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A Visit to Stan Brakhage (2003)
Character: Himself
A portrait of Brakhage shot in Victoria, British Columbia, just a few months before his death. Filmmaker Pip Chodorov illustrates Brakhage's reflections on his art with short passages from his hand-painted films.
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Brakhage on Brakhage (2025)
Character: Self
Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy.
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Abstract Cinema (1993)
Character: Himself
Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their own experiments in the field of visionary filmmaking.
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The Art of Vision (1965)
Character: Man
A deconstruction of Dog Star Man that takes the four rolls and shows them first combined, then each combination of three rolls, then each combination of two rolls, then each individual roll. The plot is of a man who goes up a mountain with a dog to chop down a tree but has some unspecified transcendental experience while he is there.
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I... Dreaming (1988)
Character: N/A
Phrases of Stephen Foster, set to music by Joel Heartling, are set to film in this autobiographical piece: a solitary female voice, occasionally joined by a chorus, sings phrases of sorrow as we watch a solitary man in shadows in an unadorned house: he stretches out, he picks his feet, he walks across a room, he rocks in a chair. Occasionally he watches two young children at play; the film sometimes speeds up. Handwritten words, like "dark void" and "waiting longing," cross the screen. Film and phrases often come in short bursts. Outdoor it looks gray and cold.
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Reality's Invisible (1972)
Character: Self
Fulton made the film during his brief time at Harvard, where he had been invited to teach by Robert Gardner, his friend and collaborator (Fulton would later serve as a cinematographer on Gardner’s 1981 documentary Deep Hearts, among others). Reality’s Invisible could be described as a portrait of the Carpenter Center, yet it is a portrait of an extremely idiosyncratic and distinctive sort. Fulton moves us through the concrete space of the Center’s Le Corbusier-designed building—the only structure by the architect in North America—but, more centrally, presents us footage of students making and discussing their work alongside figures like Gardner, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, artist Stan Vanderbeek, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and graphic designer Toshi Katayama.
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Dog Star Man: Part I (1963)
Character: N/A
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 ax, and he's accompanied by a dog. His labors continue. There is no soundtrack. Images rush past - water, trees, and surfaces too close up to distinguish. He struggles. A fire burns. Nature, in long shots and magnified, is formidable and silent. It's tough going; he carries on. In a capillary, blood flows.
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The Stars Are Beautiful (1974)
Character: Narrator (voice)
We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the family, while the narrator explains the heavens. We see a bee up close. The narrator suggests metaphors for heavenly bodies. Scenes fade into a black screen or dim purple; close-ups of family life may be blurry. The words about the heavens, such as "The stars are a flock of hummingbirds," contrast with images and sounds of real children.
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Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2011)
Character: Himself
Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.
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Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959)
Character: N/A
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.
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Tortured Dust (1984)
Character: N/A
The culmination of a series of autobiographical films that Brakhage made about his family (collectively known as The Book of Family), Tortured Dust was shot as the filmmaker's children from his first marriage were beginning to leave the house, and edited during Brakhage and his first wife Jane's impending separation. The first half concentrates on Brakhage's teenage sons as they move around the cabin that has been their home for almost 20 years, and the second half turns towards the filmmaker's three daughters.
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Cat's Cradle (1959)
Character: Self
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 with their hands, occasionally looking up. A man enters a room, a woman smiles. He sits, another man sits and smokes. The cat stretches. There are close-ups of each. The light is dim; a filter accentuates red. A bare foot stands on a satin sheet. A woman disrobes. She pets the cat. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.
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Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1968)
Character: Self
Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.
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The Extraordinary Child (1954)
Character: N/A
The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father’s cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie could be taken as another example of the Romantic notion of the artist as a monstrous child or misfit, or a parody of the same rather than the personal confessional statement seen so often in these film movements.
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Invocation: Maya Deren (1986)
Character: Himself
Maya Deren is a legend of avant-garde cinema. This authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker, poet and anthropologist features excerpts from her pioneering Meshes of the Afternoon and her unfinished documentary on Haiti, interviews with Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, and recordings of her lectures. Narrated by actress Helen Mirren, this definitive documentary offers startling insights into one of the most intriguing, accomplished figures in cinema history.
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Dog Star Man: Part III (1964)
Character: N/A
Sexual intimacy. Three kinds of images race past, superimposed on each other sometimes: two bodies, a man and a woman's, close up, nude - patches of skin, wisps of hair, glimpses of a face and genitalia; strips of celluloid with lines and squiggles scratched on them; and, close-up shots of what appear to be the insides of living bodies - a heart beating, muscle and sinew and tissue wet with fluids. The exterior and interior of desire.
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Window Water Baby Moving (1959)
Character: Self (uncredited)
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 face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With the help of the attending hands, the mother expels the placenta. The infant, a baby girl, nurses. We return from time to time to the bath scene. By the end, dad's excited; mother and daughter rest.
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Dog Star Man (1965)
Character: N/A
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.
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Dog Star Man: Part II (1964)
Character: N/A
A man, accompanied by a dog, struggles through snow on a mountain side. We see film stock blister; drawn square shapes appear. Then, we see an infant's face. The images of struggling climber, baby, blurred film stock, large snow flakes, and what may be microscopic details of matter are superimposed on each other, one dominating the frame briefly to be replaced by another. As the man falls in the snow and tries to regain his feet, the baby continues to appear, first with eyes closed. Alternately, images rush by - montages of paper cutouts and life under a microscope.
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Cannibal! The Musical (1996)
Character: Noon Sr.
Heading through Colorado Territory in search of gold and women, Alferd Packer and his group of bemused companions find themselves lost, starving and musically inspired by the obstacles they confront along the way, including a die-hard Confederate cyclops, a trio of surly trappers, a tribe of Japanese-speaking "Indians," and ultimately, each other.
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Prelude: Dog Star Man (1962)
Character: N/A
A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time. Part of the Dog Star Man series of experimental films.
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Birth of a Nation (1997)
Character: Self
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
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Dog Star Man: Part IV (1964)
Character: N/A
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 include a mountain peak, farm buildings, a tree stump, a fire, a crawling baby, and the sun. The man falls and rolls. Then, later, he swings his ax.
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