By Brakhage - Anthology - Criterion Collection

Buy This Item By Brakhage - Anthology - Criterion Collection by Criterion  Available from Amazon  $34.99  on 6-28-2009     Working completely outside the mainstream, Stan Brakhage has made nearly 400 films over the past half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of "birth, sex, death, and the search for God," Brakhage has turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even actual autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary <I>Mothlight</I>, were made without using a camera at all. Instead, Brakhage has pioneered the art of making images directly on film itself––starting with clear leader or exposed film, then drawing, painting, and scratching it by hand. Treating each frame as a miniature canvas, Brakhage can produce only a quarter- to a half-second of film a day, but his visionary style of image-making has changed everything from cartoons and television commercials to MTV music videos and the work of such mainstream moviemakers as Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and Oliver Stone. <P>Criterion is proud to present 26 masterworks by Stan Brakhage in high-definition digital transfers made from newly minted film elements. For the first time on DVD, viewers will be able to look at Brakhage's meticulously crafted frames one by one. Reader Reviews Filmmaker Stan Brakhage understood that what our mind 'sees' is not all that is there, that there is something beyond the consensus reality we accept unquestioningly. In many of his films, he sought to create a cinematic experience that he referred to as "fetal perception", a visual experience without familiar objects, without memory, with no narrative and without sound, a perception without our habitual conceptual framework. A number of the films in this wonderful 24-film set are simply awe-inspiring in their ability to cause viewers to see light in a new way, to break through familiar perceptions into another dimension of seeing. Films like "Stellar", "The Garden of Earthly Delights", "Glaze of Cathexis" and "Black Ice" cause words to just shut off. Language becomes an encumbrance when watching Brakhage's hand-painted films, as words cannot go where these remarkable works can take us. Highly recommended.

By Brakhage - Anthology - Criterion Collection Available from Amazon Price: $34.99 Updated on 6-28-2009.

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