Dog Star Man: Part I
Dog Star Man: Part I
| 18 March 1963 (USA)
Dog Star Man: Part I Trailers

From a murky landscape, a wooded mountain emerges. We watch the sun. We see a bearded man climbing up the mountain through the snow. He carries an ax, and he's accompanied by a dog. His labors continue. There is no soundtrack. Images rush past - water, trees, and surfaces too close up to distinguish. He struggles. A fire burns. Nature, in long shots and magnified, is formidable and silent. It's tough going; he carries on. In a capillary, blood flows.

Reviews
CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!
BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay
Tacticalin An absolute waste of money
Hulkeasexo it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.
schachtmant This 5-part montage is clearly a technical masterpiece, but like most surreal art pieces, it is dangerous to conceptualize with any confidence. It is highly recommended that that viewer experience all five parrts as they are certainly related. Although I am ignorant of the technical aspects of filmmaking, this film surely is mandatory viewing for film students since it appears to use every trick in the book for imagery-based, fast-cut filmmaking. Conceptually (as one viewer's take on the film), the film is about a young male in a cold, snowy alpine-like setting and his dog as they work their way along through the cold, harsh, dangerous elements. We experience what hapens in the mind and body of this individual during the ordeal, including scenes of the outdoors, biomedical footage of the inner workings of the body's tissue and organs, interactions between this man and a woman's body, his dog, celestial shots, the birth and first year of a new born baby. All of this is put together with great artistic talent (I was often reminded of work by Paranjanov, Tartovsky and Greenaway but I am not sure that any connection is warranted anywhere except in my own reaction) and depicts one man's fast-paced struggle with all of these experiences. The full-length feature is long and taxes one's attention, but the journey is worth it for those willing to take such an adventure.
John Seal You may be bored silly or you may be mesmerised. You might find yourself slipping into a catatonic state. You might glance away from the screen for a moment, but you'd be advised not too. Stan Brakhage's remarkable mythopoetic epic brought back a rush of 8mm memories for me from my childhood. There are incredible images of beauty and there are bizarre images that will have you rewinding the tape to ask yourself if you just saw what you thought you saw. (You did.) Highest recommendation!
BlueNeon-2 The trouble with Brakhage, and most avant-garde film, is that, while experimentation is valuable to the artist, it isn't necessarily art in itself. This 60's film is simply an experiment in visual manipulation, which occasionally has some interesting ideas that go nowhere in particular. The division of the film into sections seems unnecessary and, as far as I can tell, follows no particular reasoning. If you're on acid, you might love this film. If you're a filmmaker, you might find it interesting here and there. In general, however, it's not worth the time.
dubnut This is not a "movie" in any hollywood-sense.Close your eyes, watch as the patterns emerge from the darkness, slip in a few memory stills from the movie of your life, make the white noise as silent as possible in your cranium (no sound in this movie at all, unless your vcr makes a hissing noise), take this seemingly unreal experience and transpose it to film, scratch the film with forks, burn it with lighters, paint on the film, crinkle it, twist it, swallow it whole the way the tibetans swallow strips of cloth to clean their intestines, wash it, reel it and see the movie of your dreams."great" isn't good enough. This film goes off the scale, as we mere humans have no method of measuring the value of such an experience. If I had 30 thumbs they would all be up. If I had to choose from 1 to five stars, I would have to obliterate the stars, turn them into black holes, wait til a few more stars gather round and post them all right here for the world to see::::::::>