In the last decade Brakhage has usually painted by hand on the film surface one frame at a time. He's also been using an optical printer to repeat many of the painted frames two or three times or more: patterns almost invisible at one-24th of a second can be seen, if only as a flash, in a 12th or an 8th. The four short hand-painted films on this program (In Jesus Name, The Baby Jesus, Jesus Wept, and Christ on Cross), grouped together as the 17-minute Jesus Trilogy and Coda (2001, made with the assistance of Mary Beth Reed), are almost entirely abstract, but bursts of red suggest blood, brown a desert landscape, and curved lines human flesh.

The Jesus Trilogy and Coda is driven by tensions between movement and stillness, depth and flatness. Many images are visible just long enough to seem stills but also contribute to the film's rhythmic flow, as patterns transform or collide with others. Skeins of lines and splashes of color create depth effects that suddenly yield to flatness. These oppositions, perceived as irresolvable paradoxes, prevent the imagery from becoming decorative or static, locating it as much in the viewer's mind as on the screen.

Colors glow with an inner light as if alive and at times seem translucent, with others shining through them; then, suddenly, they become more solid, like a relief map. These transitions, experienced as a vibration between solidity and transparence, lie within a long tradition of depicting Christ as both deity and human, spirit and flesh; Brakhage's is one of the most lucid articulations of the idea ever.

In the last of the four, Christ on Cross, Brakhage's multiple lines unexpectedly converge into a vertical pattern, then a horizontal one, several times. Soon there are fleeting glimpses of a cross, standing as a kind of essence behind all the patterns we've seen — a moment that will doubtless disturb those who admire Brakhage's efforts to free cinema's imaginative potential yet refuse to accept his films' spiritual, even devotional aspects. The Jesus Trilogy and Coda recalled for me the huge, spectacular Tintoretto Crucifixion in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice: a glowing Christ in the top center is a surprisingly tentative presence, powerful only by contrast to the chaos around and below him.

The remaining 50 minutes of the Chicago Filmmakers program consists of one of Brakhage's few photographed films of the last decade, The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him (2000). This is the third in a group informally called the "Vancouver Island films," all photographed; Brakhage is considering a hand-painted fourth, Panels for the Walls of Heaven.

The title comes from a phrase in David Copperfield: "the God of day had now gone down upon him" is Mr. Micawber's characterization of his arrest for debts. Brakhage cites as a visual influence the late Mark Rothko paintings in the Rothko Chapel in Houston; Brakhage says of both the paintings and his film, "There is a weight of darkness." And indeed The God of Day is a real contrast to the bright, glistening A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea: here darkness — which has rarely seemed more dynamic or alive in a film — is the fundamental ground, appearing between shots and sequences as if brighter things were all momentary apparitions.

The sea appears in almost infinite variety in The God of Day: light and dark, in and out of focus, from just above and from afar, even in underwater shots that suggest the mind's eye journeying beneath the surface. But it's always seen from the shore, from the perspective of a less than omnipotent observer of time's passing. Many images show the waves crashing and receding at once while others concentrate on the gentle back-and-forth motion of small waves, often made more visible by bobbing plants on the water's surface. As in John Keats's ode To Autumn," the acceptance of natural processes can be seen as an acceptance of death; here the repeated movements of the sea convey a feeling of inevitability, even of resignation.

Artists have often connected the sea with death, and water with life's journey; in four allegorical paintings by Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life, childhood is represented by a baby playing in an Edenic pool while old age is an elderly man in a small boat on the sea. In much of Brakhage's earlier work, and to some extent in the earlier portions of The God of Day, images and sequences break off at high-energy midpoints, suggesting an offscreen continuation. But what he does in most of The God of Day is sustain individual images or short sequences until they reach a natural conclusion, producing a series of endings. A wonderful pan along patterned ridges in the sand moves in several directions before ending when the camera tilts up and the view grows more distant. A fountain of water erupts, but its phallic power is diluted when we see only the foam, shot out of focus.

Brakhage's photographed work consistently conflates external objects and the inner life. And the ocean here is a metaphor not merely for life's course but for the filmmaker's consciousness. (Marilyn thinks the films are wonderful, Brakhage says, but "not what she actually went through.") Careful framing and subtle motions of his camera reflect the movement of his body and eyes, making the camera and water almost indistinguishable. Indeed, Brakhage seems to dance with the undulating surface, breaking waves, and tiny patches of foam, the camera's small jiggles sometimes seeming in perfect sync with these natural phenomena.

Brakhage's cinema of individual consciousness is often taken as egocentrism — but as often as not his films are about the artist's failure to achieve mastery over the world. Here the very fact of remaining onshore (in the 1979 Creation, Brakhage filmed from a kayak) represents human limitation. A very shallow focus in one image of the ocean makes only a few waves in midground truly sharp. And at one point in a long pan along distant ridges, their gray forms completely fill the frame — still another variety of "dark" in a film that's filled with darkness. Brakhage's theme here is not only seeing but the limits of seeing, not only the glories of light but also its loss.

For Brakhage, midlife entails the growing realization of one's mortality. In one late, key image, a patch of brilliantly colored flowers (in a note on the film, Brakhage connected them with a funeral) is covered by the filmmaker's advancing shadow. Self-consciousness, the film seems to say, involves a recognition of the way self-consciousness obscures vision, forecasting its own impending end.