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Window Water Baby Moving
Brakhage’s avant-garde classic is an intimate impression of the birth of his first child. Nothing unusual nowadays, but at the time, fathers did not even attend the delivery, let alone bring 16mm cameras to capture the most intimate details in close-up. Not surprisingly, the film was quite controversial. It features the first contractions, the actual delivery, and the cutting of the umbilical cord.
Later, he edited the occasionally shaky images into a non-chronological work. The reflection of the light falling through the window on the bathwater, two hands on a pregnant belly—these are just two examples of poetic images that flash by and sometimes return, as they were seen through the eyes of the master and nervous father-to-be. Like most of his films, it is silent.
Bio Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) is one of the most influential filmmakers in American avant-garde cinema, noted for his unflinching social commentaries and technical innovations. The wildly prolific, visionary Brakhage made more than 200 films over a half-century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, and even autopsy. Many of his most famous works, including Dog Star Man (1961) and The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight (1963), were created without using a camera at all, as he pioneered the art of making images directly on film stock, by drawing, painting, and scratching.
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- This film was #44 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025