“Work, Bike, Eat” is about youth and being young. The intention in making the film was to catch people and the relationships between things in as natural a way as possible, and to minimize the apparent intrusion of the filming process into the subject matter. The story is really a collection of vignettes from everyday life: getting a job, eating a meal at home with your parents, chance meetings with strangers, taking a nap. A carefree camaraderie pervades the film.

“Wold” because the word refers to “forests” which the poets later made “plains,” and because the word also contains the rustic sense “to kill”…this then my laboriously painted vision of the god of the forest. (SB)

“Winterlude” was the first film completed on a rear-screen rephotography system (optical printer) that I built in the summer of 1975. The film introduces a vague narrative context that remains latent throughout the main body of the film and is finally revealed in the closing sequence. The core of “Winterlude” consists of a series of landscapes containing juxtaposed live-action and painted visual elements through which trains appear, travel across the frame and disappear. (LM)

A personal ‘travelogue’ of Australia frames images of palm trees, ferries, flags and dark corners of light and shadow drawing a solitary exploration. “A flag waving gracefully in a series of dissolves and double exposures underlines the poetic reality evoked in Winter Last July, reinforced by the filmmaker’s own haunting piano soundtrack” (Ann Arbor Film Festival 1984)

A film about urban emotional and societal complexities. Different personal impressions and visions of the urban metropolis are presented through an unusual blending of verbal accounts and visual imagery, documentary and dramatic forms.

“‘Window Wind Chimes’ explores in semi-documentary manner the interrelationship between Vincent Grenier and his wife Ann Knutson in the environment of their San Francisco apartment. Conversations between them consist of fragments of arguments, apologies, affections and distillations of the personal rituals that take place between man and wife. “The film begins outside the apartment in a laundromat with a tour-de-force performance by George Kuchar rattling off at the mouth about wind chimes, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller; a character obsesssed by something or other trying to make contact with the surrounding world and never succeeding. The scene changes to the apartment where Ann and Vincent play taunting games wih each other, teetering on the edge of cruelty, games of power-playing and unresolved husband/wife tensions. In most instances he is the instigator, and she remains on the defensive. “In one scene, and ironic game is played on the viewer while the conversations continue off screen. What appears to be a vast expanse of snow, in close up is revealed to be only a white pie topping. The camera does not so much follow the action of what is taking place, but rather concentrates on the environment of furniture, walls, windows, floor tiles, etc. ‘Window Wind Chimes’ combines the best elements of straight documentary with a very personal and poetic vision.” – Bob Cowan, Take One, Feb. 1976

“…Brakhage’s treatment of the birth of his (first) daughter… is a picture so forthright, so full of primitive wonder and love, so far beyond civilization in its acceptance that it becomes an experience like few in the history of the movies.” – Archer Winsten, NY Post