BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black "brushstrokes" and hard-edge straight black and white lines. Finally there is a brilliant pinkish flare veined with curled blue lines which engenders a resolution between these (above described) alternating modes - colors in the straight-line sections, lines among the artifice of "flowers," a kind of dark lattice-form which knits the two modes, gray and colored "clouds" which correlate them.

In the autobiographical tradition of the earlier Sincerities, this film takes up the light-threads of our living 14 years ago when the Brakhage family found home and "settled," like they say, into some sense of permanence. This quality of living in one place tends to destroy most senses of chronology: thus, along lines-of-thought of growing and shifting physicality, events can seem to be occuring simultaneously (a thot-process 'kin to that of THE DOMAIN OF THE MOMENT), and the memory of such a time IS prompted and sustained by details of living usually overlooked or taken-for-granted (such as Proust's cookie which prompted "The Remembrance of Things Past"). Michael McClure's "Fleas" and Andrew Noren's "The Exquisite Corpse I" were additional sources of inspiration for the making of this work.

Resurrectus Est is a hand painted film which suggests, from the first, a spread of fragments of plants and flowers, individual petals and bits of twig with multiple colors, with much green "leafiness". This gives way to solid yellows and browns of, or suggesting, dried grass and earth (the decay, as it were, of the above mentioned fragments); but then again, and so spaced with clear light whites as to appear airy, wind-blown, somesuch, miniscule fragments of plant life, gradually enlarging to fill-the-frame. Amidst the many floral and earthen tones, there is a particular ethereal pale, almost phosphorescent, blue which so dominates the scenes of its appearance as to cause the darker earthen yellows to lighten into a mixture with the blue that suggest abstract Easter: these tones finally take over to such an extent that the flower-fragments can no longer be seen clearly as such.