Created in 1968 by Robert Comings and Ben Van Meter in Bolinas, CA. Original sound & music performed on homemade acoustic instruments. Including a very funky clavichord with numerous drone strings, gongs were found pipes. Script is based on: "The Book I Always Reach For But Never Find" by Boc Ging. This film was created before any digital equipment was available to the general public. Some sections of the film were embellished with dyes by hand. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
Created in 1968 by Robert Comings and Ben Van Meter in Bolinas, CA. Original sound & music performed on homemade acoustic instruments. Including a very funky clavichord with numerous drone strings, gongs were found pipes. Script is based on: "The Book I Always Reach For But Never Find" by Boc Ging. This film was created before any digital equipment was available to the general public. Some sections of the film were embellished with dyes by hand. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
1970-01-01
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Using rapidly edited, superimposed images of plants, trees, water, the sun and the moon, Incantation weaves a dynamic tapestry of organic forms and textures, combining its images with a fierce rhythmic intensity so as to suggest a kind of natural force. The film was shot entirely in the camera, in 8mm, according to a pre-arranged, music-like score, and then blown up to 16mm using a home-made optical printer. The accompanying sound track, a chant taken from Islamic liturgy, is breath-based and brings the film into the form of a prayer. Written by re:voir. - Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
In this silent color 8mm film shot in Venice Beach in 1961, Taylor Mead plays “the faggot” who persistently cruises a butch guy intent only on fishing in one of the canals. Mead uses the magic wand of a radio antenna to transform himself into ever more implausible drag figures in his attempts to garner the guy’s interest, but only succeeds in soliciting his amused laughs. “I played eight or more roles in this film–all bizarre, outrageous, non-pornographic but upsetting to many mores.” (Taylor Mead) Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Anthology Film Archives in 2011.
Fischinger's abstract designs accompanied by Gitta Alpar singing. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2000.
A dirge-like hula song illustrates humanity's woes. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.
A comedic satire of psychological thrillers. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.
A static close-up of a clock. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.
RAINDANCE plays directly on the mind through programmatic stimulation of the central nervous system. Individual frames of the film are imprinted on the retina of the eye in a rhythm, sequence, and intensity that corresponds to Alpha-Wave frequencies of the brain. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.
An award winning 45-minute film portrait of Al Neil’s life, music and art. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
"The quote is Joseph Conrad answering a critic who found his books too long. Conrad replied that he could write a novel on the inside of a match-book cover, thus (as above), but that he "preferred to elaborate." The "Life" of the film is scratched on black leader. The "elaboration" of color tonalities is as the mind's eye responds to hieroglyph." - S.B. (Note: it seems possible that Brakhage misattributed this quote, which appears to be from William Faulkner and/or W. Somerset Maugham). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.
"nodus knot, node - more at NET) ... 4a: a point at which subsidiary parts originate or center ... 5: a point, line, or surface of a vibrating body that is free or relatively free from vibratory motion." In the tradition of SKEIN this hand-painted film is the equivalent of cathexis concepts given me by Sigmund Freud (in his "Interpretation of Dreams"), 30 years ago, finally realizing itself as vision. (Quote: Web. 7th). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.
"The full 35-millimeter frame allows for more detail and diversity than Brakhage's customary narrower gauges. In the first section, multicolored blobs contrast with fuzzy photographed lights; in the third, flickering specks become hundreds of tiny rods and later cracks in paint. Rhythmic complexity has long been a characteristic of Brakhage's work, but the series takes polyphony to new heights by creating different movements in different portions of the frame; there's a sense of shapes being generated and reabsorbed in a cosmic vision of eternal change." -- Fred Camper, Chicago Reader. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
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 and 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 a phosphor sky. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
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. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
Here are a couple films from the mid-'60s, given to Gordon Rosenblum at the time, which surfaced this year needing preservation. I don't know what to make of either of them except some insistent quality of "poem" each somehow is. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
CRICKET REQUIEM is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed film which juxtaposes bent, sometimes saw-tooth, scratch shapes multiply colored in pastels on a white field juxtaposed with emerging, and sometimes retreating, bi-pack imagery of the faintest imaginable lines (solarized lines) etched in brown-black. This interplay continues until the latter imagery begins to dominate with increasing recurrence. Then suddenly there's a vibrant mix of thick black lines (which is "echoed" once again near end of film) that alters the increasingly colored bent lines and their thin-stringy accompaniment, with rhythms which suggest a stately and emphatic end. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
Featuring the stories and music of seminal Cajun musicians "Bois Sec" Ardoin and Canray Fontenot, Dry Wood is a short, vibrant documentary portrait of life, food, music and festivity in the Louisiana Delta from the singular Les Blank. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 1999.
A prototype of modern music videos, this is an animated film set to the music of two popular tunes recorded by Herb Alpert and his Latin-flavored brass ensemble - "Spanish Flea" and "Tijuana Taxi". Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2003.
A man lives in peace and harmony. But one day his quiet life is interrupted by demons. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
An old square-headed man tries to watch TV while a little girl makes a playful ruckus outside. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.
This short is about a purple dinosaur named Sigmund, who likes to bounce on top of trees. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2011.