Programs

Please join the Brakhage Center for the 2025 Brakhage Symposium 

March 1st and 2nd in ATLAS 100, University of Colorado Boulder

The Brakhage Symposium is a 2-day forum on contemporary experimental film and media, featuring screenings and panel discussions with internationally renowned visiting filmmakers.

This event is free and open to the public.

Mondays from 4-5pm in the Brakhage Center, ATLAS 311

View films from Stan Brakhage and many other visionary experimental filmmakers on 16MM. Each screening will feature three short experimental films that clusters around a question.  Screenings will be followed by lively conversation.

February 10th
March 17th
April 14th
 

Monday December 2nd at 5pm in The Brakhage Center, ATLAS 311

LGBTQ Studies and The Brakhage Center is proud to partner with @visual_aids for Day With(out) Art 2024 by presenting Red Reminds Me...,  a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today.

The program features new work by Gian Cruz, Milko Delgado, Imani Harrington, David Oscar Harvey, Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar, Nixie, and Vasilios Papapitsios. A day of mourning and action that uses art to respond to the ongoing HIV and AIDS crisis, Day With(out) Art encourages museums, universities, museums, and art institutions to present related programming on or around December 1, World AIDS Day. Because AIDS is not over!

Mondays from 2-3pm in the Brakhage Center, ATLAS 311

View films from Stan Brakhage and many other visionary experimental filmmakers on 16MM. Each screening will feature three short experimental films that clusters around a question.  Screenings will be followed by lively conversation.

September 23
October 14
October 28
November 18
December 2

Thursday September 26 at 1 PM in the Brakhage Center - ATLAS 311

Filmmaker and writer Karel Doing will talk about his research into film deterioration and his experiments with growing images. After working closely together with film archivists Doing became fascinated with the effects created by fungi on nitrate film. This led him to do further research which eventually guided him toward the invention of the phytogram. Doing will talk about his process and his book Ruins and Resilience: the longevity of experimental film (Goldsmiths Press, 2024) Additionally, two of his films will be screened.

Wednesday November 13 at 1:30 PM in the Phil Solomon Screening Room - ATLAS 102

Tess Takahashi will discuss abstraction and embodied modes of mark making in relation to questions of race, gender, and sexuality in artisanal films that draw on the tradition of Brakhage’s work: Emma Hart's Skin Film (UK, 2005-8) and Ja’Tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience (US, 2015).

Abstraction in experimental film has functioned as a perplexing blank space for critics, who too often want to connect the abstract image to a solid anchor of meaning – like the body of the artist who made it. But when this anchor is a racialized, gendered, or sexually desiring body, it can have the effect of repeating familiar stereotypes. What happens if, instead of reading these films as demonstrations of selfhood, we read them as opening spaces that interrogate this very relationship?