Mothlight


Rental Format(s): 16mm film

Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black.

"Brakhage made MOTHLIGHT without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine." - Jonas Mekas "MOTHLIGHT is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter's struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. MOTHLIGHT is on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being." - Ken Kelman

Awards: Brussels Int'l Film Festival, 1964; Spoleto Film Festival, 1966.


The National Gallery of Art has generously provided funding for a new distribution print of Mothlight now available from Canyon Cinema.

Rental Fees

  Fee  
16mm film $35.00  

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