Presented in their original 8mm format

Tonight begins a series of films and videos which were made with standard ‘home-use’ equipment: regular 8, super 8, video 8 and Pixelvision. Modest, intimate and highly personal, these works offer a welcome contrast to the larger canvases demanded by films and videos designed for public display. Brakhage’s cycle of thirty 8mm Songs (1964-69) was made in the aftermath of the filmmaker’s epic, Dog Star Man. Through them he re-discovered the spontaneity and immediacy of his own vision, creating scaled-down images sacrificing nothing as complex visual expression. The program will present each Song in sequence, then repeat a few as many as three times.