All Films

The story of a matron and a midget in the heat of an unbridled passion. The colors run thick and heavy for paint and prurient pleasures as the electronic canvas unscrolls to reveal a bevy of beasties and beauties of nature and the unnatural. A non-stop melodrama of a patron of the arts shot by real art students in a real art school! A collaborative project I worked on with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Baby animals are the cutest things; no wonder the talented Kidsongs troupe enjoy singing music that's all about them, including such hummable tunes as "Woolly Bully," "Jeepers Creepers" and more. Watch as the kids feed a baby lion, pet small fuzzy bear cubs, and laugh at the antics of baby chimpanzees!

Iwate Prefecture in northeastern Japan is the setting for "The Legends of Tono," a unique collection of regional folktales, gathered in the early 20th century by Yanagita Kunio. The tales manifest and explain invisible forces and malevolent events which shape the psycho-cultural dimensions of Japanese indigenous beliefs and folk faith. Inspired by "The Legends of Tono," HORSE/KAPPA/HOUSE records the surrounding landscape in a number of small villages throughout Iwate Prefecture in order to create a cinematic space which echoes, by implication and association, the external and unseen world in the environment.

Sometimes the camera films of its own volition. Macumba shows an optical tangle in 13 scenes. As a start signal one hears a double hammer blow arising from a black screen, a sound like the nailing shut of a coffin. Macumba develops slowly out of the black. A black porno couple on the telephone in London. Then they meet on a snake in a park and are, together with Kalahari Bushmen mixed to a film matrix which is as incomprehensible as real life.

The film proper begins as Baillie takes the passenger seat of an older Honda and films an hour-long drive in the rain. Baillie's attention moves from passing images on the roadside to other vehicles to the raindrops that squirm across the windshield. Underneath the real-time gambol, Baillie supplies a soundtrack, ostensibly on a tape thrust into the car's cassette-radio player at journey's start, that lampoons local, folksy radio shows with snippets from movies, Golden Age radio, public service announcements and authoritative commentary by an incomprehensible child. The track lends a nostalgic air to a film devoid of humans as objects but filled with meditative rumination and startlingly poetic imagery, such as a large truck enveloped in the water spray kicked up by its own wheels.

Artists McCarthy and Kelley re-stage classic 1970s performance pieces by Vito Acconci, with a decidedly ironic Southern California sensibility. States McCarthy: "[The piece] is a reference to art now, to a resurgence of the 1970s and an interest in youth in the art world. There are also references to Hollywood 8 movies and soft porn made in the Hollywood hills... In Fresh Acconci, the New York art scene is sandwiched with Hollywood. Two kinds of aesthetics overlap. The tape itself crosses lines of what is politically correct, exploitation and softening or obscuring the meaning."

A film version of a performance by Fiona Shaw of T.S. Eliot's poem.

This film is a series of five little hand-painted and elaborately step-printed sections which are individually titled but so inter-related I've decided they should always be shown in this order together, but each such a distinction of the essentially un-nameable subject matter they variously facet that they should retain the character of individual pieces within their shared context ... a context I've attempted to represent by a small "b" for my name "Brakhage." The five segments (with individual running times) are: Retrospect: The Passover (2:14), Blue/Black Introspection (1:32), Blood Drama (2:29), I am Afraid: And This is my Fear (2:29), Sorrowing (2:14)

Stranger Baby (1995) is a 16mm mock science fiction film that explores what it means to be normal or considered ‘alien.’

In Painter, the mythology of the artist as hero is attacked in a grotesque, parodic performance that unambiguously points to the abstract expressionists. Performing as the painter, McCarthy undermines pre-packaged ideas about the creative process by turning it into an absurdist soap-opera.

A day in a life of a Berlin slacker.

There are four performers in the film - a drummer, a swimmer, an ice skater and a fourth woman. Although the protagonists never appear together they are inextricably bound up by their actions. Meaning is conveyed through movement and its associated sound and the accompaniment of the drummer. The film takes place both above and below water, on ice, and in a room visited by the fourth woman.

Animated short film by Phil Mulloy.

A Telly award winning video! 1995 pro National footage, Jeremy McGrath exploits tracks and natural terrain alike, Carmicheal and Lusk on a private playground, Lamson and Reynard at Washougal, Donnie Schmit on a frozen lake and much more!

San Francisco's North Beach in the 50's - A mix of jazz, poetry and art - The Beach recreates the atmosphere that prevailed through first-hand accounts from the actual "players" along with photographs and artwork from that vibrant time.

Part 2 of Trilogy. Dedicated to Phil Solomon. The "Truths" of this film, which the title prompts, are slightly recognizable patterns of fish and animal biology, plant and flower shapes, and human anatomy which are interwoven with pastel cubes and other geometries - pastels as if "hung" in a white light interwoven with straight and diagonally bent black lines, eventually clear architectural forms. The recognizable patterns are literally etched on black leader (primarily) and interspersed with very organic painted forms on white. There is often an intended sense of hair and mucous membrane amidst these forms and interwoven with the electric "x-ray" sense of bones. The interplay between black-and-white sections and multi-colored sections increases until there is some sense of merging the two toward the end.

Armed with an overripe script and ample supply of false eyelashes and lip gloss.

Taa Tam of the Maha Tribe knew music before music even existed... or so this imaginary legend goes. He saw rhythm everywhere: in the flutter of the leaf, in the pounding of corn, in the pulse of the planet. One night, he dreams himself into a place where all he touches becomes an instrument. Wood and bone metamorphose into xylophone and rattle. Animal hide resounds with the deep voice of the drum. With his soul on fire, an exultant Taa Tam discovers his ability to bring alive the passion that has been locked inside him for so long. Volcanoes erupt and flames leap to the vigorous beat of the world's premier concert. Wrapped in luxuriant colours and a vibrant sound track, Taa Tam celebrates human creativity at a performance where music is the guest of honour. A film without words.

GIFT discusses the idea of public space : on a public beach, right across from a residential block, a young boy begs the filmmaker to let him join soccer players in order to appear on television. The faces of the passers-by staring at the camera and the supporter's shouts communicate the identity of a public space.

Documentary about documentarian Winfried Junge.

They are travelogues in photographic fact and in the mind. Unable to afford printing them, I had stuck them in a drawer. The first was made in 1991, the second through sixth in 1992, seven and eight in '93, and the ninth in '92.

This is a hand-painted, step-printed (with a variety of effects) film which begins with rock-like earth-toned shapes in darkness, followed by increasingly lighter pastel-colored mini-boulder forms to the right and left of the frame mimicking a whitish vertical tunneling (giving the illusion the viewer is moving upward, finally). Then there are garishly colored crystals (primarily green and red) seeming to "bloom" (as if minerals were crystallizing into flowers). Suddenly it is as if tubular phosphoressences (mostly purple, blue and green) are undulating in a dark field. Flashes of white and rhythmic blanks of pastel colors punctuate these transformations which soon become plant-like - beseeming stalks of marsh grass under water, interrupted by whirling garish crystal flowers. Several times, in these passages, the film goes to these blanks of pastel tones. Finally the film ends on a series of these blank tones shifting among blues and blue-greens exploding into white.

The Father Moon Ik-hwan had been imprisoned for inaugurating the National Security Law after visiting North Korea. However Korean people’s desire for reunification heated up the whole country and Moon Gyu-hyeon and Lim Su-Gyeong visited North Korea. That means Father Moon’s visit to North Korea triggered Korean people’s desire for reunification. This film represents the Father Moon’s point of view on and people’s movement on reunification through influence of his visit in North Korea in 1989.