Movies Similar to Reflecting Thought: Stan Brakhage

Nathaniel Dorsky: An Interview(2014)

In his contribution to the On Art and Artists interview series, Nathaniel Dorsky (b.1943) begins by discussing his childhood love of the John Ford film Stagecoach and its influence upon his decision to make films while attending Antioch College. Describing the affinity he developed for work operating at the intersection of film materiality and personal language, Dorsky explains how he developed his philosophy of the “devotional film” and the “microcosmic viewer.” Dorsky likens his practice to Buddhist sculpture, referring to himself as a “Japanese poet continuing aspects of the ethos of the Marxist revolution.” In the interview, the artist describes his use of the screen as an “altarpiece for the image” and emphasizes his use of editing to create works which “harmoniously coalesce.” Interview conducted by Jeffrey Skoller in May 2000, edited in 2014.

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Running Fields II(2024)

Fifteen images of a camera running in a park and in obscurity searching the space of light through distorsion and the sensory of rapid motion.

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Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days (Take 1)(2012)

“Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days”, is a four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi. Structured in two sections or ‘takes’ of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities.

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good boy(2023)

The author's erotic imagination is mixed between desire and magazine clippings, and the trade of collage becomes a ship that travels from outer space to the city itself.

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Grid(2021)

A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).

6.0

Phantom Islands(2018)

Phantom Islands is an experimental film that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that ultimately results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.

4.2

Homo Sapiens Project (100)(2013)

HSP 100 is a portrait of experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain. As Le Cain discusses his life, work and relationship with cinema, Rashidi envelops him in a hallucinatory audio-visual ambiance that ultimately results in a poetic dialogue with the ideas and feelings he expresses.

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Phantasia(2024)

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

8.0

The Beaches of Agnès(2008)

Filmmaking icon Agnès Varda, the award-winning director regarded by many as the grandmother of the French new wave, turns the camera on herself with this unique autobiographical documentary. Composed of film excerpts and elaborate dramatic re-creations, Varda's self-portrait recounts the highs and lows of her professional career, the many friendships that affected her life and her longtime marriage to cinematic giant Jacques Demy.

7.7

A Little Love(2023)

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.

10.0

FUCK TV(2019)

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

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Mysterious Object at Noon(2000)

A camera crew travels through Thailand asking villagers to invent the next chapter of an ever-growing story.

6.4

Deshilando Luz(2025)

A film essay that intertwines the director's gaze with that of her late mother. Beyond exploring mourning and absence as exclusively painful experiences, the film pays tribute to her mother through memories embodied by places and objects that evidence the traces of her existence. The filmmaker asks herself: What does she owe her mother for who she is and how she films? To what extent does her film belong to her?

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Swinging Light(2025)

An experience of a camera swinging in different gestures facing the optical distortion of the Sun. The last appearance of the smudge.

5.0

Ya viene el cortejo…(1939)

Women from the different Spanish regions dress in their traditional costumes to attend the triumphal parade celebrating the victory of Francisco Franco and the rebel side over the Second Republic in 1939; the deeds of past heroes are remembered; and a patriotic poem by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío is recited.

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Godard by Godard(2023)

Godard by Godard is an archival self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard. It retraces the unique and unheard-of path, made up of sudden detours and dramatic returns, of a filmmaker who never looks back on his past, never makes the same film twice, and tirelessly pursues his research, in a truly inexhaustible diversity of inspiration. Through Godard’s words, his gaze and his work, the film tells the story of a life of cinema; that of a man who will always demand a lot of himself and his art, to the point of merging with it.

7.8

From 9 to 5

Passing vignettes of the lives of workers and citizens, what home means to them, and inter-city transportation...

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Dickson Experimental Sound Film(1894)

William K.L. Dickson plays the violin while two men dance. This is the oldest surviving sound film where sound is recorded on the phonograph.

6.1

Ballet Mécanique(1924)

A pulsing, kaleidoscope of images set to an energetic soundtrack. This is a world in motion, dominated by mechanical and repetitive images, with a few moments of solitude in a garden.

6.5

Something Walks in the Woods(2023)

A viral video shows a mysterious figure walking along the edge of the woods each day, and filmmaker Bill Howard sets out to spend a night there to find out exactly what it is.

4.3