James Broughton

Broughton reads his poetry over various images.

Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Portraits of some of the gay community's most renowned artists and spiritual leaders, with commentary by noted author and photographer Mark Thompson.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

In this homage to Zen poet Basho, the subtle changes of a pond are chronicled on film over a period of time. Broughton recites his cuckoo haikus in the background.

A single-frame portrait of Broughton's disembodied heads coming slowly together in wiggle, wobble and wonderment.

A chronicle of the iconoclastic life of gay poet, filmmaker, and spiritual visionary James Broughton, one of the defining voices of the sexual revolution, whose groundbreaking artistic celebrations of sexuality and the body influenced generations of the 1960s and '70s to profoundly embrace life and ‘follow your own weird’.

'Adventures of Jimmy' resolves its immature hero’s quest for “playmates” through a tongue-in-cheek narration that juxtaposes ironically with the images. We are told his family left him their whole estate, as we see a shack in the woods. The happy resolution is a joke on monogamy. It’s a straightforward story, the work of someone who wants to entertain with elegance and quiet subversion.

Jungle Girl, experimental film master Richard Myers’ intensely personal tribute to Frances Gifford, star of the Republic Pictures serial of the 1940’s, a gentle, dream, memory work of haunting visual beauty.

"TESTAMENT is James Broughton's exquisite self-portrait. A major figure in avant-garde filmmaking and poetry since the 1940s, Broughton views his life and life's work with irony, charm, humor, and a combination of joyous self-love and gentle self-depreciation. Scenes from his earlier films mix the elements of humor, magic, slapstick, melodrama, and romance which mark his aesthetic. A plethora of rich personal symbols is woven throughout the film, tied together by verbal games, Zen poems, anecdotes, songs, a child's prayer, dreams, and visions." - Karen Cooper "James Broughton's TESTAMENT is one of the most remarkable films ever produced within the American independent cinema. It is the most moving and most sublimely detached of the recent trend of filmic autobiographies - by Jerome Hill, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Brakhage, to name only the masters, and Broughton's peers." - P. Adams Sitney "A beautiful, important, mysterious work." - Amos Vogel

Mapping extreme close-ups of Broughton's body, the camera slowly becomes a tool to reveal the erotic beauty of the body and the sensual pleasure in loving oneself. The ecstasy and power of sexual gratification are celebrated by the camera, as it probes, reveals, and visually caresses. Broughton's song is a praise of his body as divine androgyne, and an acceptance of this higher, sexual power.

This 11 minute homage to the male member shows its subject in the various stages of erection. The voice-over poem by James Broughton includes the line "This is the secret that will not stay hidden."

The love shaman calls for a sexual revolution of the body politic urging mankind into a new love age.

A motion portrait of poet James Broughton, by his long time partner and filmmaker Joel Singer. Original music by Lou Harrison.

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.

"The poet Daisy Aldan (who brought Gerard Malanga into the world of experimental filmmaking) directed a beautifully evocative and impressionistic documentary, Once Upon an El, in 8mm color with a 7 1/2 ips tape soundtrack. The 15-minute film's cast included John Ashberry, James Broughton, Chester Kallman, Frank O'Hara, Olga Petroff, Kermit Sheets, and other luminaries of the Avant-Garde, the soundtrack was composed by Storm de Hirsch. Once Upon An El documented the activities of a group of writers and composers...[demonstrating] against the demolition of New York's Third Avenue elevated railway (FMC 1967, 7-8) , which was demolished anyway" - Wheeler Winston Dixon

No synopsis available yet.

Celebrating the circulation of the waters of the world, this homage to James Broughton's favorite sage Lao-tsu is illustrated by the dance of sunlight on the sea. Accompanying poem (read and written by James Broughton) was composed to the music of Corelli, from his Concerto Grosso No. 9 in A, performed on the harp by Joel Andrews.

Broughton reads his poetry over various images.

Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.

Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.

Images, Joel Singer; Sounds, James Broughton. "The film is shot both through and at a window, superimposing and conjoining, thereby elaborating events on both sides of the glass. Broughton's accompanying poem sings the same song as the images, sounding from an Eden of the golden passing of days: "They were seeing the light every day then ... / They were looking and they were seeing / They were living there in the light at that time." - Robert Lipman, On the Films of Joel Singer

James Broughton's counterculture masterpiece about nudity and a bed.

In this homage to Zen poet Basho, the subtle changes of a pond are chronicled on film over a period of time. Broughton recites his cuckoo haikus in the background.

A single-frame portrait of Broughton's disembodied heads coming slowly together in wiggle, wobble and wonderment.

People quietly or mischievously pass the time in an overgrown garden full of statues, while a puritanical, funereal gentleman posts bills prohibiting all leisure activities.

People quietly or mischievously pass the time in an overgrown garden full of statues, while a puritanical, funereal gentleman posts bills prohibiting all leisure activities.

'Adventures of Jimmy' resolves its immature hero’s quest for “playmates” through a tongue-in-cheek narration that juxtaposes ironically with the images. We are told his family left him their whole estate, as we see a shack in the woods. The happy resolution is a joke on monogamy. It’s a straightforward story, the work of someone who wants to entertain with elegance and quiet subversion.

The film travels in close-up over the mysterious terrains of nude human bodies as they touch and explore one another.

Poems narrate four afternoon vignettes; each protagonist is older than the one in the previous sketch.

"TESTAMENT is James Broughton's exquisite self-portrait. A major figure in avant-garde filmmaking and poetry since the 1940s, Broughton views his life and life's work with irony, charm, humor, and a combination of joyous self-love and gentle self-depreciation. Scenes from his earlier films mix the elements of humor, magic, slapstick, melodrama, and romance which mark his aesthetic. A plethora of rich personal symbols is woven throughout the film, tied together by verbal games, Zen poems, anecdotes, songs, a child's prayer, dreams, and visions." - Karen Cooper "James Broughton's TESTAMENT is one of the most remarkable films ever produced within the American independent cinema. It is the most moving and most sublimely detached of the recent trend of filmic autobiographies - by Jerome Hill, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Brakhage, to name only the masters, and Broughton's peers." - P. Adams Sitney "A beautiful, important, mysterious work." - Amos Vogel

Mapping extreme close-ups of Broughton's body, the camera slowly becomes a tool to reveal the erotic beauty of the body and the sensual pleasure in loving oneself. The ecstasy and power of sexual gratification are celebrated by the camera, as it probes, reveals, and visually caresses. Broughton's song is a praise of his body as divine androgyne, and an acceptance of this higher, sexual power.

This 11 minute homage to the male member shows its subject in the various stages of erection. The voice-over poem by James Broughton includes the line "This is the secret that will not stay hidden."

The love shaman calls for a sexual revolution of the body politic urging mankind into a new love age.

James Broughton's creation myth, THIS IS IT, places a 2-year-old Adam and a bright apple-red balloon in a backyard garden of Eden, and works a small miracle of the ordinary. And since that miracle is what his film is about, he achieves a kind of casual perfection in matching means and ends.

The oneiric quest of a modern argonaut on a mysterious island located somewhere on the borders of the unconscious.

The oneiric quest of a modern argonaut on a mysterious island located somewhere on the borders of the unconscious.

Accepting the potentialities of the medium to manipulate both time and space, Broughton brings past and present head-on as he regards with adult feelings his childhood family and friends. Grown-ups romp like children, and by their magnified infantilism playfully underscore such basic traits as sadism, sensuality, arid egocentricity. (Melbourne International Film Festival)

Accepting the potentialities of the medium to manipulate both time and space, Broughton brings past and present head-on as he regards with adult feelings his childhood family and friends. Grown-ups romp like children, and by their magnified infantilism playfully underscore such basic traits as sadism, sensuality, arid egocentricity. (Melbourne International Film Festival)

A lovely, poetic, humorous and crystal investigation of mankind standing, sitting and lying down.

An old man (artist and landscape architect Bevis Bawa) contemplates the Garden of Eden.

An old man (artist and landscape architect Bevis Bawa) contemplates the Garden of Eden.