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.
Con Traje y Sin Zapatos
Images from 2000s music videos are transferred onto the film strip, torn and abstracted until the visuals convulse and shift—a tactile, poetic exploration of materiality, memory, and medium.
A speaking into the void.
A kinetic prayer and structuralist intervention. Shot entirely on an iPhone 11 in a desolate Midwest laundromat, 108 spin documents the mechanics of impermanence. The film shifts from heavy turbulence to suspended repetition—not as a path to completion, but as a study of the loop itself. Featuring a layered soundscape, the work asks the viewer to stare into the rotation until the noise becomes a mantra.
A grandmother faintly narrates her quilts, as seen through the warped glass lens of a broken camera, a laptop webcam, and a clunky Xerox scanner.
Actress and filmmaker Robyn Adams discusses her experiences with autism, gender identity, and learning to embrace her flaws. Also, she's Frankenstein's Monster now.
Amidst rising xenophobia, three South Asian settlers paint a more holistic picture of what Brampton is today. The film acts as a fleeting memory, creating vignettes of the ever changing cultural pocket, through multi language prose and 16mm film.
X-hale
In 2002, Lana Kaiser became well known in the first season of the German version of the Idol television franchise. She was born in 1985 and went by her birth name Daniel Küblböck. At only 17 years old she polarised the audience with her androgynous appearance and open bisexuality. On September 9th 2018, Lana disappeared from a cruise ship on her way to North America. Most media outlets and the majority of the public didn‘t consider calling her by her chosen name, Lana Kaiser. Philipp Gufler's video installation is a personal portrait of the singer and entertainer.
A filmmaker revisits her childhood, interweaving 16mm vignettes and her old child services documents, uncovering the truth she couldn't voice as a child.
what was the last dream you had?
In the year 2020, when the world was forced to ‘change’, I wanted to confirm what changed and what did not change in me. The white mask I wore became the screen projecting my past. My family is sometimes hurt, but support me as I suffer from schizophrenia. We live today while looking for the answer to ‘Who are we?’
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.
Noche de agosto sin luz
A film that explores the space of intimacy shared by three people who live under the same roof. Ariana, an eight-year-old foster girl from the city of Sao Luis, Iban, an anthropologist of European origin who intends to make a documentary film, and Doña Eloisa, a native woman from Itamatatiua who works in ceramics. The members of this kind of family in transit find in common a feeling that binds them intimately: the feeling of loss. Ariana, Doña Eloisa and Iban have lived the experience of separation from their mothers. Human fragility will become the truth of their relationship, even more so after Sheyla's death.
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.
Rummage is an experimental documentary of the legendary rummage sale that takes place in Far Hills, New Jersey every first weekend in May and October.
A camera rotates around the same four towers. Seasons, weather conditions and the positions of the camera change over the course of the film. The sound goes round in circles and drifts in variations.
For as long as she remembers, Francisca lives with an inexplicable and uncontrollable aversion to belly buttons. Nothing makes her more anxious than this simple part of the body and the shapes in the world that resemble it. When therapy isn't enough to solve her cherished phobia , Francisca turns to other types of methods - without any scientific basis and not recommended for anyone who suffers from the same condition.