The Riddle of Lumen is a 1972 American experimental short film by Stan Brakhage.
Brakhage made the film as a response to Hollis Frampton's 1970 film Zorns Lemma. The two filmmakers had been engaged in what P. Adams Sitney described as "a somewhat competitive dialogue about the place of cinema in modernism." He assembled The Riddle of Lumen from footage left over from previous projects.
The Riddle of Lumen is an early instance of montage. In this style of editing, there are connections between shots that are not immediately obvious to the viewer, but which accumulate over the course of the film. Critic Clinton Delancey notes two recurring images in the film: "that of sunlight flooding through the door or window of a darkened roomâ¦and that of light pools bleaching out sections of the floor". Fred Camper identifies it as Brakhage's most abstract film and contrasts it with his other works for its complex patterns of visual substitutions, the context of its imagery, and the way it "works with the light of entire frames [rather than] frames showing light within them".
In his review for The New York Times, A. H. Weiler wrote that "vision and color are artistically heightened as [Brakhage] captures varying light on objects, people, water, streets, skies and forest."
The film was the inspiration for Through the Mysterious Barricade (after F. Couperin) LUMEN 1 (for Stan Brakhage), a 1990 musical improvisation by Fluxus composer Philip Corner. Brakhage used the piece as the soundtrack for his film Passage Through: A Ritual, one of the director's few works to include sound.
The Riddle of Lumen is part of Anthology Film Archives' Essential Cinema Repertory collection. A digital transfer was made for the film's inclusion in the 2008 DVD collection '.