Scenes from Under Childhood

Scenes from Under Childhood is a series of 16mm film in four independent sections by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced between 1967 and 1970. All four sections are silent, though Brakhage made a version with sound available for the first section.

The film is often described as an attempt by Brakhage to visualize how his children saw the world.^[1][2][3] In a 2008 Village Voice review, critic J. Hoberman wrote described the film as a "glorious, two-hour plus romantic epic."^[4] In a 1992 poll for the British film magazine Sight & Sound, experimental filmmaker Michael Snow named Scenes from Under Childhood as one of the ten greatest films of all time.^[5]

When asked to describe the film, Brakhage himself wrote that it was "a visualization of the inner world of foetal beginnings, the infant, the baby, the child – a shattering of the ‘myths of childhood’ through revelation of the extremes of violent terror and overwhelming joy of that world darkened to most adults by their sentimental remembering of it… a ‘tone poem’ for the eye – very inspired by the music of Olivier Messiaen."^[6]

Film elements for all four sections of Scenes from Under Childhood are held by the Academy Film Archive as part of the Stan Brakhage Collection.^[7] Sections 1 and 3 were preserved by the archive in 2018.^[8]

• List of American films of 1967