Stan Brakhage worked tirelessly to develop a type of cinema that could adequately portray the subjective complexities of human vision. Chartres Series was his response to a visit to the greatest of French Gothic cathedrals in the early 1990s, and it epitomizes what he called moving visual thinking by combining hand painting and optical printing with a singular approach to color and rhythm. Henry Adams described Chartres as the supreme example of a "structure which should be final," and Brakhage tries to reconcile the immediacy of perception with intimations of eternity.