There will be. We hosted Marilyn Brakhage at Filmforum last Sunday, and she confirmed that they are working on a new Criterion with 29 more films (!).
Actually, she is in Los Angeles this week working with the Academy Film Archive on the telecine.
Brakhage with Brakhage - Marilyn Brakhage introducing Films by Stan BrakhageThe Machine of Eden (1970, 16 mm, silent, 11 min)
The Machine (of Eden) operates via “spots” - from sun’s disks (of the camera lens) thru emulsion grains (within which, each, a universe might be found) and snow’s flakes (echoing technical aberrations on film’s surface) blots (upon the lens itself) and the circles of sun and moon, etcetera; these “mis-takes” give birth of “shape” (which, in this work, is “matter” subject and otherwise) amidst a weave of thought: (I add these technicalities, here, to help viewers defeat the habits of classical symbolism so that this work may be immediately seen, in its own light): the “dream” of Eden will speak for itself.
“He was born, he suffered, he died” (1974, 16 mm, silent, 7 min)
The quote is Joseph Conrad answering a critic who found his books too long. Conrad replied that he could write a novel on the inside of a match-book cover, thus (as above), but that he “preferred to elaborate.” The “Life” of the film is scratched on black leader. The “elaboration” of color tonalities is as the mind’s eye responds to hieroglyph.
Burial Path (1978, 16mm, color/silent, 15min (18fps))
The film begins with the image of a dead bird. The mind moves to forget, as well as to remember: this film, in the tradition of Thot-Fal’n, graphs the process of forgetfulness against all oddities of remembered bird-shape. The film might best be seen along with Sirius Remembered and The Dead as the third part of a trilogy.
Visions in Meditation #4 (1990, 16 mm, silent, 19 min)
I’ve made three pilgrimages in my life: the 40-some-year home of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, and the mountain ranch and crypt, would you call it?, of D.H. Lawrence, outside Taos. I keep returning to the Lawrence environs again and again; and this last time attempted photography in that narrow little building where his ashes were (or were not) deposited (contradictory stories about that). There is a child-like sculpture of The Phoenix at the far end of the room, a perfectly lovely emblem to deflate any pomposity people have added to Lawrence’s “I rise in flames ….” The building is open, contains only a straw chair (remindful of the one Van Gogh painted) and a broom, which I always use with delight to sweep the dust and leaves from this simple abode. I have tried to make a film as true to the spirit of Lawrence as is this gentle chapel in homage of him. I have attempted to leave each image within the film free to be itself and only obliquely in the service of Lawrence’s memory. I have wanted to make it a film within which that child-Phoenix can reasonably nest. – S.B.
Boulder Blues and Pearls and… (1992, 16 mm, Sound by Rick Corrigan, 23 min)
Music by Rick Corrigan.
Peripheral envisionment of daily life as the mind has it - i.e., a terrifying ecstasy of (hand-painted) synapting nerve ends back-firing from thought’s grip of life.
Persians 1-3 (1999, 16 mm, silent, 8 min)
Persian Series #1: This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes intersperced by darkness, then becomes lit lightning-like by sharp multiply-colored twigs-of shape, all resolving into shapes of decay.
Persian Series #2: Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, almost black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script.
Persian Series #3: Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed weave of tones moving from oranges & yellows to blue-greens, then retreating (dissolves of zooming away) to both rounded and soft-edged shapes shot with black.
Chinese Series (2003, 35mm, silent, 2 min)
“Stan Brakhage had been planning a film inspired by Chinese ideograms for years; he made his unfinished Chinese Series in his dying months, scratching its marks on black 35-mm film. In its two haunting minutes, exploding lines flirt with the depiction of recognizable objects.” – Fred Camper, from the Chicago Reader, September 12, 2003.
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