Stan Brakhage Shorts

Garden of Earthly Delights

1981  |  USA  |  2 mins, 30 seconds  |  Silent  |  35mm

Precedes The Lovers on the Bridge

This film is a collage composed entirely of montane zone vegetation. As the title suggests, it is an homage to (but also an argument with) Hieronymous Bosch. It pays tribute as well, and more naturally, to “The Tangled Garden” of J.E.H. MacDonald and the flower paintings of Emil Nolde. 

Dante Quartet

1987  |  USA  |  6 mins, 3 seconds  |  Silent  |  35mm

Precedes Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

This hand-painted work six years in-the-making (37 in the studying of The Divine Comedy) demonstrates the earthly conditions of “Hell,” “Purgatory” (or Transition), and “Heaven,” as well as the mainspring of/from “Hell” in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnagogic vision created by those emotional states. Originally painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm and 35mm, these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yanosky of Western Cine.

Nightmusic

1986  |  USA  |  30 seconds  |  Silent  |  35mm

Precedes Thief

This little film (originally painted on IMAX) attempts to capture the beauty of sadness, as the eyes have it when closed in meditation on sorrow. “A work of hand-painted ‘moving visual thinking’; colors and forms coursing, flowing, bursting, as if of fire and water – of the earth, of the body, of the mind.” – Marilyn Brakhage