Beautiful Funerals
- Stan Brakhage |
- 1996 |
- 1.5 minutes |
- COLOR |
- SILENT
Rental Format(s): 16mm film
BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black "brushstrokes" and hard-edge straight black and white lines. Finally there is a brilliant pinkish flare veined with curled blue lines which engenders a resolution between these (above described) alternating modes - colors in the straight-line sections, lines among the artifice of "flowers," a kind of dark lattice-form which knits the two modes, gray and colored "clouds" which correlate them.
(Note: the credit to Sam Bush, Western Cine, is simply an homage to his creative craftsmanship. He is a paid employee of Western Cine, Denver, Colorado, who was hired for this job: he is in no sense a collaborator on this work.)