The Stars Are Beautiful

The Stars Are Beautiful

1974
Short Film
19m
We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the family, while the narrator explains the heavens. We see a bee up close. The narrator suggests metaphors for heavenly bodies. Scenes fade into a black screen or dim purple; close-ups of family life may be blurry. The words about the heavens, su
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The Stars Are Beautiful

1974
Short Film
19m
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Avg Percentile 31.91% from 62 total ratings

Ratings & Reviews

(62)
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Rated 02 Dec 2009
40
23rd
Wankier than usual for Brakhage. Half of it is verite footage of his family around the house, the other half is Brakhage babbling a lot of things that would have gotten him an F in Astronomy 101. Whateverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, dude. I'm not totally sure if this is supposed to be funny or not
Rated 05 Jul 2010
29
0th
Thanks for the bullshit philosophy Stan. Also, interspersing irrelevant and boring footage of your family was a great editorial choice, as it increased the amount of time I had to reflect on your nonsensical rambling attempts at poetry.
Rated 19 May 2020
3
38th
Criticizing this on a philosophical level is absurd; the film literally stems from a game Brakhage and his wife liked to play. It's a charming enough slice of his life, even if it is occasionally tedious and confusing.
Rated 14 Aug 2007
22
1st
Annoying, overreaching, tedious. Brakhage described himself as a frustrated poet, and here we can see why he was frustrated. A jumble of uninteresting new mythologies and pithy affirmations like "retention colors are the only true colors". Really, Stan? Why? None of the imagery is that imaginative and the juxtapositions are uninspiring.
Rated 20 Jan 2014
51
7th
Pretentious grade-one poetry babble by Brakhage over the top of home movies. I at least like how he mentions his filmic philosophy in his narration, but he could've done that in 18 seconds rather than 18 minutes.
Rated 11 Nov 2014
2
11th
um, what? this is a pisstake right? stan spouts a load of pseudophilosophical nonsense while his family cut feathers off chickens. whatever, it's kind of hilarious. didn't bother going through the whole 18 minutes.
Rated 28 Oct 2015
80
77th
It's wank, but it's playful wank. Brakhage's syrupy metaphors explain our place in the universe about as well as does Carl Sagan's apple pie, i.e. not well at all, and that's the point. Schrodinger wasn't literally doing any experiments on cats either. Et cetera. I was moved by this one and I'm proud to go against the grain on it. By surrendering outright, it succeeds where films like The Tree of Life fail.

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