Join us on Friday, September 14th at 7pm at The Film-Makers' Cooperative (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) for a screening of Stan Brakhage's (...) [a.k.a. Ellipses], presented by Andrew Reichel.

• (...) Reel 1 (22 minutes, silent)
• (...) Reel 2 (14.5 minutes, silent)
• (...) Reel 3 (14.5 minutes, silent)
• (...) Reel 4 (19.5 minutes, silent)
• (...) Reel 5 (14 minutes, sound)

Total Running Time: 84.5 minutes + reel changes

This work is in five reels (numbered, but called "reels" so that they don't take on the connotations of "Parts" – thus each simply a part of the "trail" of colored scratches). White scratches ((on black & white leader) which suggests, to me, a passage). The third "reel" combines these scratches with some motion picture film, mostly of the ocean. The fifth reel is the only one which has a sound track; but of course that makes the whole work a "SOUND film" because the audio track must be turned-on from the beginning. –S. B.

Arguably the culmination of Stan Brakhage's hundreds of 1990s experiments in painting and scratching film surfaces, (...) [aka Ellipses] comprises five films that Brakhage specifically referred to as "Reels." Made during the period where he was recovering from bladder cancer surgery that had been caused by his use of paints containing coal tar dyes, the film found Brakhage taking his anger over the cause of his health troubles as a fuel to push his techniques in new directions. Using a combination of nontoxic dyes, scratched black film with color emulsion, and colored lights with optical printing, Brakhage found a new way to conjure a feature's worth of infinite variations on color and shape. Having been shown both collectively and as individual works during his lifetime, most contemporary viewers have largely seen (…) Reel Five on its own thanks to its inclusion in the Criterion Collection's By Brakhage home video. This screening provides an opportunity to both appreciate the five-act structure of (...) as a collective work, and to see it projected according to Brakhage's suggestion: with the sound turned on even for the first four silent reels.