S.B. was perhaps the most complex and productive director on the underground and experimental scene of the post-war period; more that 350 films in fifty years, trying to create a visual and visionary cinema, an endless vision with blind eyes, which translates into a long and ‘overall’ concept of watching. Brakage’s is the cinema of paradox and visual ‘waste’, not really verbal or logical, but blended in with an enigmatic symbolism.
One of the major authors of the New American Cinema, risen in the ‘50s – ‘60s between the East and the West coast, he represented for 50 years a permanent mark of an aesthetic research on the borderline of the celluloid world: B. is the director of life when he shoots the birth of his children (the first one in Window Water Baby Moving, the second one in Dog Star Man and the third one in Thig Line Lyre Triangular), but he’s also the director of death when he films his dog’s decomposition in Sirius Remember, extreme act of love but also guilt: death still plays a central role in The Dead, and also in the ‘trip’ inside a corpse, the visual autopsy that is ‘The act of seeing with one’s own eyes’. B. is the director-artist who paints, scratches and manipulates every frame of the filmstrip (Hand Painted films), marking pieces of his existence on it, insomuch as his death (March 9th, 2003) is strictly related to his use of carcinogenic dyes. Director of symbol and of mythic and alive nature (Dog Star Man), as much as the dream world and the subconscious (Murder Psalm), till the manifestation of still life in Mothlight and The garden of earthly delights: director of the twilight, as much as lights and colours: Stan Brakhage. 

Maya Deren has opened and paradoxically closed the second American avant-garde, mentor for all the experimental directors of those years. From the second avant-garde, NAC will rise: the underground cinema of Brakhage, Anger and Markopolus. Alongside the various themes she explores in her films (psychological states, sexuality, surrealism, etc.), of great relevance were her studies on the film language and her research on the notions of space, time and movement. In 16 years, she produced six films - plus some unfinished ones - , she wrote two books ("An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film" 1946 e " Divine Horsemen : The Living Gods of Haiti " 1953) and she gave a great contribution to anthropology through her studies and her field works.