Experimental Film of the Day – Dog Star Man, Stan Brakhage. (1961-1964)

Dog Star Man is another brilliant film by Stan Brakhage. It was released from 1961 to 1964 and is comprised of a prelude and four parts. The five short films are typically shown together as one piece. Per P. Adams Sitney,

'(It's) one of the key works of the American avant-garde in the 1960s. Consisting of a prelude and four parts, this is Brakhage's allegorical version of creation and his magnum opus. A formidable, layered and richly textured work that you can never get to the end of, Dog Star Man develops in mythic and nearly systematic terms the universal vision inherent in lyric films. More than the entire body of the American avant-garde cinema, this work is situated in the rhetoric of romanticism, in its description of the emergence of conscience, the cycle of the seasons, the battle of man against nature and the sexual ambivalence in the visual evocation of an earthly titan bearing the comic name, "Dog Star Man".'

Here it is in its entirety: