An important early film by Stan Brakhage, which Joseph Cornell commissioned as a record of New York's Third Avenue elevated train before it was torn down. Curiously lacking in people, the film focuses on the rhythms of the ride and reflections in train windows, finding a real-world version of the superimpositions Brakhage would later create in the lab. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.

"The first months of marriage, with moments of mutual awareness, frightening understandings, lovemaking." -S.B.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, Raymond Rohauer was one of the nation's foremost proponents of experimental cinema. This two-disc collection continues Kino's tribute to the Rohauer Collection, including the early works of Stan Brakhage and influential films by Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Mitry, Sidney Peterson and others. The piece de resistance is Jean Isidore Isou's passionate manifesto of film aesthetics Traite de Bave et d'Èternite; (Venom and Eternity), which sparked a riot when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. This edition of Venom includes 34 minutes of footage never seen in the United States.
Music composed and performed by Sue Harshe, Larry Marotta and Jon C. Mirsalis
Produced for video by Bret Wood
Production superviser: Brian Shirey
Special thanks to Tim Lanza
Licensed by the Douris Corp.

A man, accompanied by a dog, struggles through snow on a mountain side. We see film stock blister; drawn square shapes appear. Then, we see an infant's face. The images of struggling climber, baby, blurred film stock, large snow flakes, and what may be microscopic details of matter are superimposed on each other, one dominating the frame briefly to be replaced by another. As the man falls in the snow and tries to regain his feet, the baby continues to appear, first with eyes closed. Alternately, images rush by - montages of paper cutouts and life under a microscope.

尸体解剖过程纪实。

Four young men and a young woman sit in boredom. She smokes while one strums a lute, one looks at a magazine, and two fiddle with string. The door opens and in comes a young man, cigarette between his lips, a swagger on his face. The young woman laughs. As the four young men continue disconnected activities, the other two become a couple. When the four realize something has changed, first they stare at the couple who have kissed and now are dancing slowly. The four run from the house in a kind of frenzy and return to stare. The power of sex has unnerved them.

该影片是对暴力的一次剖析。四个年轻男子和两个年轻女子坐着同一辆车出游，这几个人中有两个男孩子正为了其中一个女孩子暗中较劲。这辆车行驶到偏僻路段的时候抛锚了，驾驶员去寻找过路车辆的帮助，而剩下的人则在一个大胆的女孩子的带领下走到一座疑似采矿点的废弃建筑那里去。其中一个男孩到了那里就坐下看书。那个胆大的女孩子则继续探索这座废弃的建筑而且还被被一些东西吓到尖叫。两个情敌和另一个女孩子赶紧冲过去找她，她接下来说出的话让这两个追求者突然扭打在一起。看书的人很厌恶地走开了，两个女孩子劝完架也走开了。那么这个故事将如何收尾呢？

Flares of color break into streams of light, leaves, wood grain and prism-etched vegetation. A moon lifts out of this dark weave to be replaced by autumn leaves against a grainy sky, a fiery sky. A gray cat licks itself. A black cat sits quickly down on a green lawn. A "night" of showering dark, a "dawn" of pinks and yellows of plant growth in close-up. A gentle yellow "high noon" prevails into which the orange worm appears and reappears, twisting, arching, turning. A phosphorescent orange of leaves explodes midst greens and black holes appropriate to the image of the worm. The forms of many varieties of leafage mix with a veritable rain or clash of overall tones, a fire of forms, a glowing color photo-negative of worm, and the final canopies of autumn tone and sky tone permeated by sun, sun streaks and octagonal prism shapes ad infinitum.

Peripheral envisionment of daily life as the mind has it - i.e., a terrifying ecstasy of (hand-painted) synapting nerve ends back-firing from thought's grip of life.

The "star", as it is singular, is the sun; and it is metaphored, at the beginning of this film, by the projector anyone uses to show forth. Then the imaginary sun begins its course throughout whatever darkened room this film is seen within. At "high noon" (of the narrative) it can be imagined as if in back of the screen, and then to shift its imagined light-source gradually back thru aftertones and imaginings of the "stars" of the film till it achieves a one-to-one relationship with the moon again. This "sun" of the mind's eye of every viewer does not necessarily correspond with the off-screen "pictured sun" of the film; but anyone who plays this game of illumination will surely see the film in its most completely conscious light.

斯坦·布拉哈格描述他的电影为“心灵的眼睛做爱的手绘可视化”。我的脑子里几乎找不到可以被称为色情，但是其中很多是视觉感官。在某种程度上，这是由于他的绘画技法在这里，因为许多单独的图像中被强烈噼啪作响或impastoed显然拍照还是湿的，所以，在不断变化的光漆辉耀。此外，图像变化的速度比平时跟他慢得多。而不是预期的每秒12-24图像，在这里我们看到2或3每秒，并有更多的时间享受抽象的形状和色彩丰富通过调色板旋转。如果某些数字为导向的人决定要全部通过Brakhage在他的上百个短片完成个人画作的算，我想我们会发现，毕加索是不是20世纪后，所有的最多产的画家。 “Lovesong”形成了一个引人注目和满足的结论为“通过Brakhage”集合。

Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.

"Sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a 'medium' cat." -S.B.

Visiting the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado, abandoned about 1275, Brakhage thought, "There is terror here." And so he returns again and again to those empty stone homes.