USA

Paul Bartel directed this film version of a performance art piece by O-Lan Jones, Andrea Stein, and Jim Turner, who play Tina, Pam, and Scotty — three grown-up kids who have spent the last thirty years sealed off in a backyard family bomb shelter. A prologue explains what happened: in 1963, when John Kennedy is assassinated, a typical middle-class family from Anaheim retreat to their backyard bomb shelter, afraid that the commies are coming. In 1993, they are still there — even Mom and Dad, who have since died, but the bones are laid out nicely on their bed. The brother and two sisters, in worn-out clothing, amuse themselves by playing silly little games (something called “Egyptian Fantasy” with Ken as the Pharaoh), engaging in absurd rounds of role playing (Tina as a high-school tease), and hurling senseless rebukes at one another (“I can’t hear you. I’ve got a set of encyclopedias up my butt” ).Read More »

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Is it a nightmare or an actual view of a post-apocalyptic world? Set in an industrial town in which giant machines are constantly working, spewing smoke, and making noise that is inescapable, Henry Spencer lives in a building that, like all the others, appears to be abandoned. The lights flicker on and off, he has bowls of water in his dresser drawers, and for his only diversion he watches and listens to the Lady in the Radiator sing about finding happiness in heaven. Henry has a girlfriend, Mary X, who has frequent spastic fits. Mary gives birth to Henry’s child, a frightening looking mutant, which leads to the injection of all sorts of sexual imagery into the depressive and chaotic mix.Read More »

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 »

The year is 1957. The cast and crew of the Lester Guy Show are extremely apprehensive about their upcoming live television broadcast on the Zoblotnick Broadcasting Co. network. Lester Guy despises fellow cast member Betty Hudson for unknowingly becoming more popular than him and schemes to destroy her career. Only two of the seven episodes were written by David Lynch.Read 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 »

Captain Celluloid battles the evil Master Duper and his criminal gang, the League of Film Pirates, who plan to hijack copies of classic films, copy them and sell them to desperate film collectors all over the world.Read More »

Judy Irving (“The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”) follows a wayward California pelican from her “arrest” on the Golden Gate Bridge into care at a rehab facility and explores nesting grounds, Pacific coast migration and survival challenges.Read More »