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.
Social & External
Self
Presenter
Nevermore Eleanor (2024) | 2160p
Landscapes revealed themselves through text, paper through movement, while the sun gave them relief. This is a journey across found words, enunciating a discovery, their textures constructing the sea and the waves, in a travelogue from the first exploration, the first step over the sand towards the shore. “Amor” writes this joy to underline it in its time, captured on paper. This film has been composed through a scanner, and it’s the first chapter of the “Reír al Sol” series.
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.
The Hypergaussian Wars is an AI-generated feature-length audiovisual work exploring algorithmic warfare, obsolete media and the transformation of images through repetition, saturation and collapse. Built from thousands of generated images, synthetic landscapes and references to 14th–16th century painting, the film stages a continuous conflict between historical visual culture and contemporary computational systems. Fragments of obsolete video games, ruined architectures, military simulations and post-human figures circulate through increasingly unstable environments. Rather than telling a linear story, the film operates as an image system in which visual excess progressively erodes meaning. The Hypergaussian Wars reflects on memory, obsolescence, artificial intelligence and the persistence of images after their original function has disappeared.
Fifteen images of a camera running in a park and in obscurity searching the space of light through distorsion and the sensory of rapid motion.
Filmmaking icon Agnès Varda, the award-winning director regarded by many as the grandmother of the French new wave, turns the camera on herself with this unique autobiographical documentary. Composed of film excerpts and elaborate dramatic re-creations, Varda's self-portrait recounts the highs and lows of her professional career, the many friendships that affected her life and her longtime marriage to cinematic giant Jacques Demy.
A short experimental film about the human race taking over nature.
Twenty images of a camera running next to a chemical platform and capturing abstract light throught improvised gestures and asymmetrical motion
Twenty-four images of a camera running in the woods, a moonlight and a cemetery through improvised gestures, mechanical abstraction and saturated colors
After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.
Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
A roll and a half made to delight in color and the presence of friends. Steps toward learning to read in the dark.
"My first 16mm, Sightreading, was shot in August 2022 in Minneapolis and Chicago. It uses images from three sources: black mattes held in front of the sky near my parents’ house which were filmed and edited in-camera to a metronome; my friends drinking wine and discussing The Bachelor in their Chicago apartment; and details of a Breughel painting filmed from a television." -NC
'Afloat' is an experimental film that paints a portrait of Japanese performance artist: Ayumi Lanoire. The film opens as a telephone call between Ayumi and Person X, which meanders the audience through the various layers that make up her personas leading one to wonder whether she is in fact a myth or reality.
"Bagong Buhay" is a short experimental film that dispels the common belief that packing up and moving to a new place will magically improve one's quality of life. The film challenges this presumption by portraying two contrasting ways of life through objects and locations, encouraging viewers to think critically about the complexities of what makes a better life. In the Philippines, it's believed that relocating to a new area will bring about positive changes in one's existence. True satisfaction is a complex and multifaceted notion, and "Bagong Buhay" encourages us to ponder that relocating to a new place is not a surefire way to attain it.
A film essay that intertwines the director's gaze with that of her late mother. Beyond exploring mourning and absence as exclusively painful experiences, the film pays tribute to her mother through memories embodied by places and objects that evidence the traces of her existence. The filmmaker asks herself: What does she owe her mother for who she is and how she films? To what extent does her film belong to her?
A Bunch of Questions with No Answers (2025) is a 23-hour film by artists Alex Reynolds and Robert M. Ochshorn. Compiled entirely from questions posed by journalists at U.S. State Department press briefings between October 3, 2023, and the end of the Biden administration, the work removes the officials’ answers, leaving only the unresolved demands for clarity and accountability.
SEDUCED AND ABANDONED combines acting legend Alec Baldwin with director James Toback as they lead us on a troublesome and often hilarious journey of raising financing for their next feature film. Moving from director to financier to star actor, the two players provide us with a unique look behind the curtain at the world's biggest and most glamourous film festival, shining a light on the bitter-sweet relationship filmmakers have with Cannes and the film business. Featuring insights from directors Martin Scorsese, 'Bernando Bertolucci' and Roman Polanski; actors Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain and a host of film distribution luminaries.
A documentary focused on plastic pollution in the world's oceans.
Filmmakers discuss the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock and the book “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (“Le cinéma selon Hitchcock”), written by François Truffaut and published in 1966.
Daniel Craig candidly reflects on his 15 year adventure as James Bond. Including never-before-seen archival footage from Casino Royale to the upcoming 25th film No Time To Die, Craig shares his personal memories in conversation with 007 producers, Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.
In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.
This special explores the return of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to the screen, as well as Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to their classic roles. Director Deborah Chow leads the cast and crew as they create new heroes and villains that live alongside new incarnations of beloved Star Wars characters, and an epic story that dramatically bridges the saga films.
This character-driven film considers the evolving sex trafficking landscape as seen by the main players: the exploited, the pimps, the johns that fuel the business, and the cops who fight to stop it.
With unprecedented access to the official archives and intimate recollections from the band, both current and past, Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition invites fans to experience one of the most iconic journeys in music history. Spanning five decades, this electrifying documentary charts the band’s rise from the pubs of East London to the world’s biggest stadiums. Featuring exclusive interviews with band members and contributors such as Javier Bardem, Lars Ulrich and Chuck D, as well as all-new animated sequences of the band's legendary mascot, Eddie, the film offers a rare and intimate look at Iron Maiden’s uncompromising vision and unwavering connection with their truly global army of fans.
An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.
A documentary about the life and films of director John Ford.
A detailing of the rise to prominence and global sporting superstardom of six supremely talented young Manchester United football players (David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Phil and Gary Neville). The film covers the period 1992-1999, culminating in Manchester United's European Cup triumph.
Stars of "The Walking Dead," Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira, walk down memory lane and visit iconic locations where pivotal moments between their characters, Rick and Michonne, were filmed.
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.
JB Smoove and Martin Starr host a celebration of 20 years of "Spider-Man" movies, from the Sam Raimi trilogy to Marc Webb's movies and the trio from Jon Watts.
The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.
A documentary about ten very different lives connected by having appeared onscreen wearing masks or helmets in Star Wars.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
A purely observational non-fiction film that takes viewers into the ethically murky world of end-of-life decision making in a public hospital.
Ross McElwee sets out to make a documentary about the lingering effects of General Sherman's march of destruction through the South during the Civil War, but is continually sidetracked by women who come and go in his life, his recurring dreams of nuclear holocaust, and Burt Reynolds.