“Barbara Sternberg's Like a Dream that Vanishes also evokes Brakhage, but in a much more critical way. Although the film evokes other traditions (it begins and ends with Sharits-like flickering frames of solid color), Sternberg's central concern is with debunking the metaphysical claims Brakhage makes for sight, childhood and nature. Laced through Dream are excerpts from an interview with a philosopher who chats about the possibility of miracles and the arguments David Hume made against divine intervention into the natural world. But in the footage surrounding the philosopher, Sternberg exhausts the catalog of Brakhage techniques (scratched emulsion, close-ups of animal fur, children running in the grass, etc.), while the ominous soundtrack indicates that Sternberg fails to find the miracles that the philosopher discusses and that Brakhage celebrates in his early films and writings. This is especially true of Sternberg's portrayal of children. Instead of Brakhage's blessed tabula razas, the kids in Dream are aggressive consumers (as in repeated footage of a boy tearing into Christmas presents and angrily shaking a Batman doll box) or pot smoking sullen hipster teens. (These teens, in fact, remind me of the scenes of Brakhage's grown-up children in later, more despairing films like Tortured Dust [1986].) Although the film's philosopher-character praises "wonder" at the end of the movie, the dream that vanishes is the dream of Brakhage's modernism, the dream that nature offers a miraculous coherence and beauty open to anyone who knows how to truly see. The curatorial coup of the "Views from the Avant-Garde" was following Reed's Moon Streams and its joyous appropriation of Brakhage's ways of seeing with Sternberg's pessimistic denial of the miraculous.” (Children, Nature, Fragmentation: An Idiosyncratic Review of the New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde" by Craig Fischer)