Sexual intimacy. Three kinds of images race past, superimposed on each other sometimes: two bodies, a man and a woman's, close up, nude - patches of skin, wisps of hair, glimpses of a face and genitalia; strips of celluloid with lines and squiggles scratched on them; and, close-up shots of what appear to be the insides of living bodies - a heart beating, muscle and sinew and tissue wet with fluids. The exterior and interior of desire.

”My laboriously painted vision of the god of the forest." -S.B.

“Much of what has been said about this film could be repeated here, except that Rage Net arises from meditation upon, rather than being trapped psychologically by, rage." -S.B.

A hand-painted and photographically step-printed film, which exhibits variably shaped small areas of color (in a dark field) that explode into full frames of textured color interwoven with white scratch patterns that create a sense of interior depth and three-dimensional movement.

Inspired in part by a dream he had of murdering his mother, Brakhage here gives us one of his profoundest meditations on human aggression.

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 20,000 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.

Visiting the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado, abandoned about 1275, Brakhage thought, "There is terror here." And so he returns again and again to those empty stone homes.

"The ecstatic, mythic montage of Alaskan landscapes" is also "about the act of making" and an antidote to the stodgy notion that life crawled forth from a warm primordial soup.

"Sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a 'medium' cat." -S.B.

Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.

Stan Brakhage described his film as "a hand-painted visualization of sex in the mind's eye". My mind finds little that could be called erotic, but much that is visually sensuous. In part, that is due to his painting techniques here, as many of the individual images are strongly crackled or impastoed and apparently photographed still wet, so that the paint glistens in the changing light. Additionally, the rate of image change is much slower than usual with him. Rather than the expected 12-24 images per second, here we see 2 or 3 per second and have more time to enjoy the abstract shapes and the rotation of rich colors through the palette. Should some numerically-oriented person ever decide to count the total of individual paintings done by Brakhage in his hundreds of short films, I think we'll find that Picasso was not the most prolific painter of the 20th century after all. "Lovesong" forms a striking and satisfying conclusion to the "By Brakhage" collection.

The "star", as it is singular, is the sun; and it is metaphored, at the beginning of this film, by the projector anyone uses to show forth. Then the imaginary sun begins its course throughout whatever darkened room this film is seen within. At "high noon" (of the narrative) it can be imagined as if in back of the screen, and then to shift its imagined light-source gradually back thru aftertones and imaginings of the "stars" of the film till it achieves a one-to-one relationship with the moon again. This "sun" of the mind's eye of every viewer does not necessarily correspond with the off-screen "pictured sun" of the film; but anyone who plays this game of illumination will surely see the film in its most completely conscious light.

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.

Flares of color break into streams of light, leaves, wood grain and prism-etched vegetation. A moon lifts out of this dark weave to be replaced by autumn leaves against a grainy sky, a fiery sky. A gray cat licks itself. A black cat sits quickly down on a green lawn. A "night" of showering dark, a "dawn" of pinks and yellows of plant growth in close-up. A gentle yellow "high noon" prevails into which the orange worm appears and reappears, twisting, arching, turning. A phosphorescent orange of leaves explodes midst greens and black holes appropriate to the image of the worm. The forms of many varieties of leafage mix with a veritable rain or clash of overall tones, a fire of forms, a glowing color photo-negative of worm, and the final canopies of autumn tone and sky tone permeated by sun, sun streaks and octagonal prism shapes ad infinitum.