Rather than cast its gaze at the world beyond, the films of Stan Brakhage seem to look no farther than the filmmaker’s own eyelids. And why shouldn’t they? Their convulsions of scratched emulsion, anamorphically twisted images, split-second cuts, and bursts of light and color and startling image (resembling a Pollock canvas as rendered by a kaleidoscope) unreel like a life flashing before one’s eyes. Maybe some variation of a Brakhage film was the last thing Stan Brakhage saw when he died March 9, at age 70.

As part of its "Stan Brakhage: In Memoriam" program, the Harvard Film Archive will screen this Saturday the avant-garde icon’s most celebrated film, Dog Star Man (1961-’64), which consists of a Prelude and four Parts that embrace the entire cosmos — from the individual to the stars, from birth to death, from chaos to enlightenment. And it is indeed heavy going. In Part 1, the title hero, played by Brakhage, undergoes the mythic ordeal of ascending a snowy summit to cut down a tree. His task is nothing compared to the viewer’s in unraveling the densely layered, frantically edited, elusive imagery — a pulsing heart, a flaring solar disc, the moon, magnified snowflakes and flowing blood cells, genitalia, a bewildered baby — from the kinetic palimpsest of the rest of the film.

As P. Adams Sitney points out in his book Visionary Film, Brakhage is inspired by the mythology of William Blake, not to mention the formal technique of Johann Sebastian Bach. After the single layer of Part 1, each subsequent part has superimposed on it an additional layer of footage, so that by Part 4 the film is a four-themed fugue. (It all gets ironed out in Brakhage’s four-and-a-half-hour The Art of Vision, the 1965 film in which the footage runs consecutively and not simultaneously.) Whether this cleanses the doors of perception depends on the individual, but it sure gives the eye and the imagination a workout. (78 minutes)