“Cat’s Cradle” was released in 1959 and was created by Stan Brakhage. It is an experiment short. Stan was an avant garde film maker whose work was often experimental. The short was filmed in Princeton, New Jersey. Brakhage described the film as sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a cat acting as a medium. The film was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.
The six-minute film is a repetitive series of images from various angles in rapid succession. They are of a cat, two women, a foot on a pillow, wallpaper, two men and what looks like an insect. Most of the time the men are smoking, and the women are doing various tasks. Occasionally there is a quick shot of the women naked, but they are fleeting and mixed in with the rest of the montage. The images are shown in various lighting and speeds and sometimes the film footage appears to be damaged. The images are mostly in red tones and the film is silent. The images are of various lengths. Many of the shots are blurry or out of focus.
The people in the short are Stan Brakhage and Jane Brakhage, who was his wife at the time the film was shot, composer James Tenney and visual artist Carolee Schneemann.
Stan made close to 380 films that ranged from 9 seconds to 4 hours long. He was a professor of film studies at the University of Colorado. His most noted ‘film’ was the shot of the Downy fabric softener bottle falling and landing into a fluffy towel in a commercial for the product.
The film is a quick watch and basically six minutes of confusion.