A lonely figure walks to a private screening room. What he is getting excited about is not what it may appear. “Hand Job” is a hand-processed, manipulated, and toned film that shows the filmmaker’s true love for the medium.
Filter Films
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This cameraless animation is about the 1:1 relationship between sound & picture: the 1:1 concept became the structure for the entire piece and spawns further thought about relationships between elements in cinema (artist to medium, viewer to screen, projector to film).
1:1
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This is a collection of 6 hand-painted sections interspersed with black leader – which has been and will ONLY be shown in this form and under this title. The first is what I call “plein-aire abstract” inasmuch as I am, while making the film, observing specific surroundings (primarily Vancouver Island, mostly the city of Victoria) but am painting the reactions of my internal optic system affected by external scenes, only occasionally (and obliquely) identifiable. The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as “pictures” (there is even a mirror image of a neon bar sign which persists for a few frames twice) but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by, say, the colours of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ordinarily by the cellular shifts and shapes of the optic system receiving exterior imagery. The second is as removed as possible from any recognition of either exterior scene or interior feedback phenomena. It is, in its ineffability, as close to pure visual music as I can make it, more inspired by “The Preludes” of Bach or “The Preludium” of Buxtehuda than anything of my surroundings when I was painting. The third, again, is “plein-aire abstraction” as defined above (painted in New York City) – with, for example, even a correctly toned green impression of The Statue of Liberty – and, then, impressions of Toronto with its architectural particulars appearing, midst hurrying people- shapes (almost as if photographed at times). This segment is “double-printed” (i.e. 2 frames for every painted one). The fourth is also “double-printed” and, as such, is an extreme mixture of (1) darks shot through with jewel-like bursts of colour, and (2) very white bursts of light and fleeting coloured forms. This is purely interior vision and as unlike anything describable as I could possibly make it. “Double-printing” and “plein-aire” also is the fifth section: herein thick weaves of multi-colored lines and dull-coloured blobs play off against each other. The sixth, and last section is almost a bursting of mostly golden light forms as if heralding sunlight itself in their hurried (single-frame) display. (Stan Brakhage)
Preludes 7 – 12
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This film of single-strand photography begins with the “fire” of reflective light on water and on the barest inference of a ship. Throughout, the interwoven play of light and water tell the inferred “tale” of the film through rhythm and tempo, through visible textures and forms in gradual evolution, through resultant “moods” generated by these modes of making, and then, by the increasingly distant boat images, birds, animals, fleeting silhouettes of people and their artifacts, flotsam and jetsam of the sea-dead, as well as (near end, and almost as at a funeral) flowers in bloom, swallowed by darkness midst the crumbling of the sand castles. Those nameable objects (sometimes, at first, quite enigmatic) are the frets of symbol; but always the symbolic content is swept back into the weave of the sea and light and seen, as is the merry-go-round near the beginning of the film, or the horizontally photographed fountain mimicking incoming ocean waves, to be as if spawned in the mind during oceanic contemplation. (SB)
God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him, The
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In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. Persian Series #6 begins with what appears to be dried red and yellow rose petals, suddenly shot-through with blue, which causes a shift to violets and greens. This mash of colors thickens and is scored by white, and then black, calligraphic lines, which are “echoed” in all previous floral colors whose “dance” seems to turn clock-wise and “explode” into fiery reds. Persian Series #7: very pale, thin, hieroglyphic pinks, greens and blues in a white space, which is thickened over by ribbed mashes of these colors which “dissolve” into varied shapes almost suggesting landscapes and ephemeral bouquets. Dark blurred shapes mix with each other and give way to clock-wise-turning pillars of yellow, scored with white glyphs, at times, and fading mashes of tones and, finally, calligraphic shape. Persian Series #8: pale petal and stem like shapes counter punted rhythmically by an even paler “background” of truly ephemeral (almost invisible) shapes. Again, the foreground movement is clockwise and often “ribbed” as the film darkens into a blend of foreground and background and eventually, a meld as of white hardened clots fretted by glyphs. Persian Series #9: sharp edged “chunks” of color set in black, straight, often multicolored lines, piercing shapes, imprisoning them, until they are fragmented bits of color in black: repeated of this theme again and again until darkness prevails, but is then broken open by pure white shards and “spears” restoring the original “dance” of hard-edge shapes and lines, which then begin to whirl clock-wise, interspersed with fade-outs, and then shatter into “confetti” texture, in black burnt-sugar-shapes and then overwhelming flare yellow. Persian Series #10: “twigs” of color in space, and pure white “ghosts” of them in the background interspersed with amalgams of these and conglomerate forms, The resolve of these themes is a combination of “amalgams” and “ghosts” at one in interplay, and then dark slashed spaces with “webs” of white, webbed spaces on white and, finally, solarization of colored forms -midst which the frame-line rises from bottom and drifts a few seconds visible, creating an insubstantiality of the frame of these images. Persian Series #11: begins with a “window” of yellow paint in the full frame of multi-colored paint-shapes. Alternating black space/white space exists as a backdrop for slashes and curves of color -reds and blues shifting to red-blue-green, and then yellow, etc. slashed in black. Persian Series #12: “hot” by-play of red-greens-yellows in black, blurred, finally, as the color shapes are shifted violently from side to side, finally ending with a sharp entanglement of multicolored twig and/or stem-like forms. (Stan Brakhage)
Persian Series 6 – 12
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“Todd’s poetic documentary excavates the history of a family home that has been passed down five generations. It uncovers a sort of violence done in the course of carving up the land and trying to purify one’s family histories.” – Chris Gehman, Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, 2001
Fable: I Want the World, Clean
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As these local boys remind you in this three-part work, you can never be sure what really goes on next door.
Boys Next Door, The
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“The Jesus Trilogy and Coda” is composed of the following four parts: 1) “In Jesus’ Name” presents an almost continuous fluttering movement midst the complexity of multiple small shapes in mostly autumnal colors, like unto a wind moving through fall leaves. Embedded in this skein (almost as if branches of this scene) are the dark lines ephemerally (almost invisibly) composing the conventional face of Christ. 2) The second film, entitled “The Baby Jesus” begins with pearl-pinks and gold-flecked shapes midst “garden greens.” It proceeds to contrasting desert scenery slashes of sand-yellow under black “sky,” with ephemeral suggestions of animal locomotion. Then there’s some sense of darkened interior, the colors of swaddling folds. Rolling hills, and a starred “night sky” with flecks of herded white, then a gathering of colors as of collected people shapes. After intervening black, the beseeming rocky side of a hill increasingly flecked with blood red. The desert-likeness comes again with, again, animal-like locomotion. Mills, mottled white, like snow, give way finally to peacefully wood-toned enclosures. 3) The third part, “Jesus Wept,” utilizes a variety of shapes and colors so fretters and interlocked with darkness as to create the sense of a glamorous terror within which palpable shapes of “tears” appear and weave a counterbalance of sorrowful calm. Because these “tears” are as if in bas-relief (side and front lit), textured and altogether of such a visual solidity, they form an aesthetic bulwark against the (back lit) fret of forms. 4) Finally, “Coda: Christ on Cross” contains the most easily nameable of all the shapes in this trilogy: it is, thus, an aesthetic “summing-up” with full emphasis upon the crucifixion which is visible again and again as a mass of twisting lines and tortured forms, flecked with vermilion blood-likeness. The intervening scenes are stark, dark dramatics, reactive to the recurring cross. The conventional face of Jesus is occasionally visible as lines that are consonant with the, at times, almost renaissance draftsmanship of these scenes. The attempt is to sum-up Death as iconic triumph in relation to the three previous films. (SB)
Jesus Trilogy and Coda
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“Preludes 1 – 6” is comprised of six hand-painted and double-frame printed sections of 16mm film: 1) Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular “water-marks” of blotched paint giving way to multi-colored brush strokes which then thin to something akin to the beginning. 2) Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes, which, gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues. 3) Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst “clouds” of color finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them. 4) Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes, which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi transparent in their “weave” with each other which, is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears of color. 5) This section is very similar to #4 except it is composed of extremely thin-lined colors and sharply delineated shapes, which are constantly interrupted by ‘cloud’ like forms. 6) Interplay of mostly horizontal lines interwoven with “water-mark” forms in a wide variety of tones, which gradually tend to dissolve into blues at the end. (Stan Brakhage)
Preludes 1 – 6
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In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. 1) This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes interspersed with darkness, then becomes lit, lightning-like, by sharp multi-colored twigs of shape, all resolving into shapes of decay. 2) Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script. 3) Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed weave of tones moving from oranges and yellows to blue-greens, then retreating (dissolves of zooming away) to both rounded and soft-edged shapes shot with black. 4) Elaborate petal-like, stamen-and-stem-like, multi-colored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly swift mixtures of every conceivable previous (in the Persian Series) shape, evolving back to brilliant petals against what was at the beginning of #4. 5) Dark blood red slow shifting tones, often embedded in dark, and often shot-through with parallel wave-like lines composed of all previous shapes and flowers, as if trying, linearly to evolve a glyph-script. (Stan Brakhage)
Persian Series 1 – 5
