The Lion and the Zebra Make God's Raw Jewels

1999 • Directed by

Stan Brakhage

This film is a hand-painted combination of shapes which suggest, as appropriately colored, jungle, open veldt, horizontals of grasses, shag-shape yellow of lion's mane, the black & white stripes of the zebra, the eyes, the teeth, the tearing open into raw blood-red meat and curve of bone. Nonetheless the film is in no sense an animation work but rather a collection of mostly un-nameable shapes which gather round this recognizable iconography and visually dominate the image which repeats its, thus, ephemeral chase-and-catch increasingly closer, finally obliterating all but the "jewels," the multiple coloring, referred to in the title.