Experimental

In the autobiographical traditional of earlier SINCERITIES, this film takes up the light-threads of our living 14 years ago when the Brakhage family found Home and ‘settled’, like they say, into some sense of permanence. This quality of living in one place tends to destroy most senses of chronology; thus, along lines-of-thought of growing and shifting physicality, events CAN seem to be occurring simultaneously (a thought-process ‘kin to that of THE DOMAIN OF THE MOMENT), and the memory of such a time IS prompted and sustained by details of living usually overlooked or taken-for-granted (such as Proust’s cookie which prompted ‘The Remembrance of Things Past’). Michael McClure’s ‘Fleas’ and Andrew Noren’s THE EXQUISITE CORPSE III were additional sources of inspiration for the making of this work.Read More »

Made with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts. This continuation of my autobiography is composed of film photographed by many people: Bruce Baillie, Jane Brakhage, Larry Jordan, and Stan Phillips, among others. Most of the footage is drawn from some 2,000 feet of ‘home movies,’ ‘out takes,’ and the like, salvaged from my photography over the years. It is of the Brakhage family’s coming into being. It is composed in the light of those electrical traces we call ‘memory’; and it is as true to that ‘thought process’ as I was enabled to make it.Read More »

This, the first completed reel of work-in-progress, draws on autobiographical energies and images which reflect the first 20 years of my living. I have three definitions of the word Sincerity to sustain my working along these lines of thought with this autobiographical material: (1) Ezra Pound’s marvelous mistranslation of a Chinese ideogram – Sincerity… the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally…(of which I would change, for my purposes, the last word to visually), (2) Robert Creeley’s trace-of-the-word for me on the back of a Buffalo restaurant menu Sym-keros… same-growth (Ceres) CREATE… of the same growth, and (3) Hollis Frampton’s track-of-it to ‘the greek’, viz – ‘a glazed pot (i. e. one which will hold water).’ This film might best be seen, then, as a graph of light equivalent to autobiographical thought process.Read More »

Constructed like an animated painting in a single fixed shot where light, voice, music and movements interfere.Read More »

Stages a double persona on a music of Monteverdi (Ariadne’s lamento interpreted by Janet Baker).

A Reading of Absis’ Text by Marguerite DurasRead More »

“This footage was shot and edited from 1966 to 1970 and then edited to completion over a two year period ending in July 1982. Hours for Jerome (as in a Book of Hours) is an arrangement of images, energies, and illuminations from daily life. These fragments of light revolve around the four seasons. Part one is spring through summer; Part two is fall and winter.” (N. D.)Read More »

Images from the texts of Rumi, 13th century Sufi poet.Read More »

Quote:
“An autobiographical reflection on his unassuming name leads the filmmaker down a wayward path through family photographs, personal archives, and internet searches. Alternately wry and wistful, peppered with Smith’s characteristically droll commentary, Being John Smith flits between self-deprecation and cris de coeur, offering quietly hilarious observations on Smith’s lower middle class origins and career as an avant-garde cinema luminary, as well as unexpectedly melancholic impressions on age and extinction.” New York Film FestivalRead More »

Combines true stories to create its titular character, and parallels with the manufacturing of a gun. The two stories’ convergent paths twist in a double helix of violence which leaves one person dead by firearms every 41 minutes.Read More »