"Science, art, and philosophy are never separate. If they seem so, it’s because one has implicitly absorbed the ideology of another. I think we’re in a moment now that’s making our nature documentaries worse. With HD, HDR, and CGI, they seamlessly illustrate already decided-upon science, making the un-human world seem as knowable and digestible as a Pixar fable. This is why, as impressive as they can be, they’re disposable. We abandon the HD doc when the 4K one comes along. In Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon’s aquariums, microphotography, and time lapses, you see how the scientists know, instead of a hyperreal demonstration of what they know. Rather than getting a God’s-eye view, you experience this other world as a limited human trying to figure it out. The visuals are murky and weird—they need interpretation, as much from background science as from poetic metaphor. There is a sense of discovery, humility, and mystery in these films, and for this reason, they convey something spiritual."

"The idea of Stan Brakhage’s films being transferred to DVD once seemed heretical. The preeminent avant-garde filmmaker of the past half century, Brakhage made hundreds of intense films, many of them silent, that seem to be pure celluloid expression—poetic visual studies based on the play of light, tactile editing, and frame-by-frame editing. He worked mainly in 16 mm, but also made movies that were painstakingly hand-painted onto IMAX-size frames. Yet shortly before his death, Brakhage embraced the idea of a Criterion set, acknowledging the reality of a future (okay, present) where his films were more likely to be seen by an individual, perhaps on a laptop, rather than projected in 16 mm to a small film-society audience. The ability to study Brakhage’s films frame by frame, and to read Fred Camper’s superb commentary, also enhances the experience, easing the bittersweet film nostalgia for die-hard celluloid purists."