Sag Es Nicht

Reflecting Thought: Stan Brakhage

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.

Running Fields IV

Twenty-four images of a camera running in the woods, a moonlight and a cemetery through improvised gestures, mechanical abstraction and saturated colors

Only Human

A tale of people unfolds under the night sky. These doomed couples and lost individuals begin journeys and attempt to find resolution in their lives. Love is observed from a distance, sadness is in the air. With little sympathy for the loss and destruction caused to the characters, the stories progress and become neatly woven into a minimalistic portrayal of modern life.

CHOKE ECHO

This isn’t a film. It’s a leaked ritual. Somewhere between analog prayer and digital disease, a collection of gestures tried to become human again. They failed. Children orbit the fence like insects around an electric hymn. A figure holds a violin but never plays — his silence is louder than the sound. The man in the branches hasn’t fallen in years. The killer appears, or doesn’t — but you’ll feel him beneath the cuts, mouthing things you’ll wish you didn’t understand. There are bodies, sometimes clothed in flesh, sometimes not. There is scripture, mangled and reversed — not to mock it, but to unlock it. The voice speaks, but only when you stop listening. This is the place where lost footage remembers you. Where noise prays back. CHOKE ECHO was compiled under duress by 0xHamza in 2025 using material never meant to be rearranged. Watch it if you must — but it will keep watching after you close the tab.

Sagesse Celestiale

Nathaniel Dorsky: An Interview

In his contribution to the On Art and Artists interview series, Nathaniel Dorsky (b.1943) begins by discussing his childhood love of the John Ford film Stagecoach and its influence upon his decision to make films while attending Antioch College. Describing the affinity he developed for work operating at the intersection of film materiality and personal language, Dorsky explains how he developed his philosophy of the “devotional film” and the “microcosmic viewer.” Dorsky likens his practice to Buddhist sculpture, referring to himself as a “Japanese poet continuing aspects of the ethos of the Marxist revolution.” In the interview, the artist describes his use of the screen as an “altarpiece for the image” and emphasizes his use of editing to create works which “harmoniously coalesce.” Interview conducted by Jeffrey Skoller in May 2000, edited in 2014.

good boy

The author's erotic imagination is mixed between desire and magazine clippings, and the trade of collage becomes a ship that travels from outer space to the city itself.

Vidéo noire

I'm invited into a room. Someone is talking to me. I keep getting sucked into another place.

Cotton Candy Chocolate River

You and AI at the end of the world.

Mancha de una vida

Taxidermia

Set over three generations and beginning with a sexually frustrated orderly during WWII who relieves his tensions in the most outlandish, gross ways. The result of his liaison is a glutton who grows up to be a champion speed eater. He produces a child who becomes obsessed with taxidermy.

Vlag

Colourful lines and geometric figures move and change to the notes of a disjointed Wilhelmus [Dutch national anthem]. As the film progresses the disjointed music finds its way back to the original and flowing performance of the national anthem. The colours and figures move simultaneously into the shape and the tricolour of the Dutch flag.

Rhythm

A comfortable rhythm composed of light and shadow. Director Ogino-style absolute movie which freely manipulates geometric figures.

À TOA

Waterbird

Exploring love's complexities, an experimental film captures a woman's brief yet significant journey, prompting her to break free and embrace newfound liberation

Recortes - 20240315

Vídeo de Um Minuto

At Land

A woman washes up on a beach and embarks on a surreal journey, encountering others and fragmented versions of herself in a quest for identity.

Medea

After escaping from her homeland and now abandoned by the man she loves, Medea must find strength from within to fight against growing injustice - how far is she willing to go?

Down Hear

A singular cinematic figure, San Francisco’s Mike Henderson became one of the first independent African-American artists to make inroads into experimental filmmaking in the 1960s. Henderson’s work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, from which this program of 16mm films is culled, thrums with a sociopolitical, humorous sensibility that lends his small-scale, often musically kissed portraits (which he later dubbed “blues cinema”) a personal, artisanal quality. - Film Society of Lincoln Center. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.