"This film is about 'nothing.' Hints of dramatic 'loss' are imaged throughout, but the primary effect of the film is to give, through fleeting and ephemeral visions, a sense of something which almost exists but unhappily doesn't." - Marilyn Brakhage

"Absence" is perhaps the most extreme of all Brakhage's Super 8 films and one of the most extreme of all the films of his tenuous and complete uprooting: a vision of a groundless existence, in which all the things we are used to knowing and using in our daily life are totally absent. (Fred Camper)