10 filmmakers, 20 short films, 2 each: Joyce Wieland, Vivienne Dick, Eileen Maxson, Sue de Beer, Amy Greenfield, Chiaki Watanabe, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Germaine Dulac, Lori Felker, Barbara Hammer

____________

Joyce Wieland
Joyce Wieland was born 30 June 1931, in Toronto. She studied commercial art and graphic design at Toronto’s Central Technical School and began making experimental films in the 1950s. In 1962, Wieland and her husband filmmaker Michael Snow moved to New York where they lived until 1970. She died from Alzheimer’s disease on 27 June 1998.

 

Cat Food (1967)
‘A cat eats its methodical way through a polymorphous fish. The projector devours the ribbon of film at the same rate, methodically. The lay of Grimnir mentions a wild boar whose magical flesh was nightly devoured by the heroes of Valhalla, and miraculously regenerated next morning in the kitchen. The fish in Wieland’s film, and the miraculous flesh of the film itself, are reconstructed on the rewinds to be devoured again. Here is a dionysian metaphor, old as the West, of immense strength. Once we see that the fish is the protagonist of the action, this metaphor reverberates to incandescence in the mind.’ — Hollis Frampton

Sailboat (1967)
‘A sailboat passes by and the word SAILBOAT can be read: the structuralist film reflects the relationship between static text and the moving images – until Hollis Frampton casually steps in front of the running camera from off-screen and a seemingly strictly composed work briefly becomes a home movie.’ — arsenal

 

_____________

Vivienne Dick
Vivienne Dick is an Irish feminist experimental and documentary filmmaker. Her early films helped define the No Wave scene. According to The Irish Times, “one of the most important film-makers Ireland has produced”.

Dick was born in Donegal and grew up in Ireland during the 1950s, attending University College there in the 1960s. She emigrated to the United States in the 1970s. Upon her arrival in the U.S., Dick became an integral figure in No Wave film culture and produced a series of seminal Super8 short films. Living in New York, which was undergoing a recession and an inexpensive place to live, many of her films were staged around well-known sites such as Coney Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the World Trade Center. The films featured punk performers such as Lydia Lunch, Pat Place (of the band Bush Tetras) and Adele Bertei (of The Contortions). Film critic and author J. Hoberman has called Dick the “quintessential No Wave filmmaker”.

 

Like Dawn to Dusk (1983)
‘Like Dawn to Dust takes up the exploration of the rural landscape initiated in Visibility Moderate but it is characterized by a very different mode of address. Instead of appropriating from radio, television or film, Dick develops a more overtly ‘poetic’ aesthetic, through performance, cinematography and sound. The opening shots of a decaying ‘Big House’ bearing the scorch marks of a fire, are accompanied by an off-key piano, recalling stage melodrama or early cinema. The house, most likely a remnant of Anglo-Irish society, is abandoned but for the figure of Lydia Lunch, wearing her signature New York ‘Goth’ make-up and clothes. Lunch delivers a poetic monologue, both on screen and in voice-over, over a traditional soundtrack and her final words emphasize the circularity of Irish narratives: ‘the past never dies, it just continually repeats itself.’ — Maeve Connolly

Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979)
‘Lydia Lunch is the protagonist of Beauty Becomes The Beast, where she appears alternately as a five-year-old child and a tough teenager. Dick’s densest and most associative film, Beauty Becomes The Beast is a virtual catalogue of female media images, ranging from Patty Hearst to ‘I Love Lucy.’ Switching scenes and modes like a bored TV watcher idly spinning the dial, the film depicts a world of women where mother and daughter are reciprocal roles in an ongoing chain of victimization…. Extremely effective, [this super 8 film] derives its considerable power mainly from the graphic regression of Lunch’s persona and from an undercurrent of sexual rage that courses throughout.’ — J. Hoberman

 

____________

Eileen Maxson
[Maxson’s] videos evoke a world of faulty transmissions, moribund formats, and women under the influence of both. Each elegantly crafted tape conjures up a hidden history of media, one that emphasizes its most marginal and ephemeral forms, honing in on the strange powers and subtle pathos of, say, a botched broadcast, and celebrating the shifting material qualities of a medium that has remained in flux since its inception…[Maxson’s videos] read like anxious dispatches from life at the dawn of a new millennium, where the limits of language have run aground upon the rapidly eroding shores of technologies past and present.

 

CINDERELLA+++ (2011)
‘Aurora picks more than berries, Lady gets a new reputation, and Cinderella meets 90210.’ — EM

CACHED CURSES (2011)
‘An ear worm exorcism, psychic bubbling of worry, trash, cash and (so last century) curses.’ — EM

 

_____________

Sue de Beer
Working at the intersection of installation, sculpture, film, and photography, Sue de Beer (b. 1973; Tarrytown, NY) creates immersive, chromatic worlds of concealed histories, buried secrets, and dramatic, romantic beauty. Often screened in site-specific environments of the artist’s own design, de Beer’s insistently narrative films are rife with allusions to literary and film histories, intimate character portraits, and meticulously crafted prose narrated by her hand-selected performers. Employing experimental optical and sensory effects throughout her work, she subtly transports viewers into vast, absorbing landscapes. Drawing on deep literary roots in her film, photography, and sculpture, the artist fuses themes and motifs borrowed from seemingly disparate genres—science fiction, gothic horror, Italian Giallo thriller, among others—into a singular visual, narrative, and cinematic language.

 

The White Wolf (2018)
‘de Beer’s new two-channel film, “The White Wolf,” is a plot-defying twenty-three minutes of werewolf innuendo, set on a fictional New England island where a mysterious medical clinic attracts the terminally ill. As the artist plumbs the folkloric, psychological, and spiritual significance of lycanthropic transformation, she metabolizes her B-movie references in makeshift sets as captivating as a view into a cracked Fabergé egg. A lighthouse in the gloom, a shadowy bar where a striptease is performed against a forest backdrop, and an examination room bathed in green light form the visual backbone of the ambient narrative. The solemn ruminations of the clinic’s head doctor (played by the musician Yuka Honda) and a tense, melancholic score by Andy Comer propel it.’ — Johanna Fateman

The Ghosts (2011)
‘The Ghosts is a two-channel film by Sue de Beer that tells the story of an occult hypnotist who can retrieve lost lengths of time from peoples’ memories and return them to the patient as if they are experiencing those moments anew.’ — Armory on Park

Watch it here

 

______________

Chiaki Watanabe
As a media artist, she creates abstract visual music works in minimalist aesthetics. As a media designer, she designs interfaces for children that can nurture creativity by integrating simple abstract visual imagery and sound. Her background is in media arts specializing in motion graphics, video art, and live visual performances.

 

1/3 (2006)
‘A 2006 piece from award-winning abstract artist Chiaki Watanabe with music by Tristan Perich.’ — iotacenter

superhighway sound injection (2001)
‘A recording of live visual music performance with minimal abstract visuals and electro acoustic music by various composers from Earunit.’ — Chiaki

 

_____________

Coleen Fitzgibbon
Artist Filmmaker of experimental shorts, docs and digital installations. Art work shown in group shows at the New Museum, MOMA, VIENNALE Film Festival, Subliminal Projects Gallery, Hunter College, Rotterdam Film Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival, London Film Festival, Knokke-Heist Experimentl Film Festival, Postmasters Gallery and others; solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, Palais des Beaux Arts, Balagan, LA Film Forum, Boda Gallery, Light Industry, Cinema Projects and other venues.

 

Found Film Flashes (1973)
’16mm, b/w, sound, 3 minutes. A collage of recurring speech fragments, which provide a patchy voice-over “commentary,” which skids across a sampling of found film.’ — CF

Document (1976)
’16mm transfer to digital, b/w, sound, 8:22 minutes. Taking it public: micro text film of records (warrants, debts, bank checks, etc.)’ — CF

 

_____________

Germaine Dulac
Germaine Dulac was born Charlotte Elisabeth Germaine Saisset-Schneider on 17 November 1882, in Amiens, France. After initially working as a journalist she became interested in film through her friend, actress Stacia Napierkowska in 1914. Dulac and writer Irene Hillel-Erlanger then founded DH Films and produced a series of films from 1915-1920. Dulac died in Paris on 20 July 1942.

 

Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque (1929)
‘Cinema visually sensitised with the deepest sense of orchestration extends below the story like elusive music.’ — Light Cone

What emerged (1928)
‘Bothered by Dulac’s non-conformist ideas, disturbed by her impure origins, the censors had refused the film.’ — CHF

 

_____________

Lori Felker
Lori Felker is an filmmaker/artist, teacher, programmer, performer and projectionist. Her moving image work focuses on the ways in which we process, share and disseminate information, via screens, dreams, gestures, games, and dialogue. By employing and pushing these structures, she attempts to study the ineloquent, oppositional, delusional, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction.

 

I OWN A CAROUSEL (2011)
‘I own a carousel. I keep it indoors, in the dark. There are no eyes to see it, no children to ride it. I own the size, presence and weight of it. I own the stress, the power and the idea of it. I did not make it, I do not enjoy it, I own it.’ — LF

BROKEN NEW 2 (Drama) (2012)
‘Watch the News unfold as it has already been broken, continues to break, and grows increasingly newer.’ — LF

 

_____________

Barbara Hammer
Barbara Hammer was born 15 May 1939 in Los Angeles. She graduated from University of California at Los Angeles with a degree in psychology and later earned degrees in English literature and film at San Francisco State University. Today she is a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

 

Optic Nerve (1985)
‘Hammer employs film footage which through optical printing and manipulation is layered to create a compelling meditation on her visit to her grandmother in a nursing home. The sense of sight becomes a constantly evolving process of reseeing images retrieved from the past and fused into the eternal present of the projected image.’ — John Hanhardt, Whitney Biennial 1985

Resisting Paradise (2003)
‘What does an artist do during a time of war? Renowned documentary filmmaker Barbara Hammer crafts an elouent layered examination of the artist’s and individual’s role in times of conflict. Featuring Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Matisse family members as well as resisters Lisa Fittko and Marie-Ange Allibert, Resisting Paradise is a compelling look at the intersection of art and life in complex times.’ — collaged

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** ellie, Hi. Oops, my trigger finger was the culprit. Yeah, Charles Ray does talk about his work that way in print when the interviewers let him, which they often don’t. They just want digestible tidbits mostly. Yes, I like David Altmejd. I have some work by him in a post coming on this Thursday in fact. He has an interesting brain, for sure. Oh, yes, Cornell’s window facades are amazing, I forgot about them. I also really love the simple seeming ones where he organises things in boxes like this one or this one. Btw, Corey Heiferman posted a tip/addendum to your comment if you didn’t see it. I lived in NYC for only about 4 1/2 years, but I do know what you mean about nothing feeling discoverable. Strange. I’ve lived in Paris much longer but I find things I’ve never seen before here all the time. Maybe the regular grid organisation of NYC versus Paris’s more complicated set up makes the difference? Because I think Paris is physically smaller than NYC. Curious. You should come to Paris for Xmas sometime! If I’m around, I’ll be happy to show you the coolest things here I know. You have the best day! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Well, yeah, SCAB has opened many doors for me, and some secret passages too. The screening is sometime between today and Thursday, I think. We aren’t invited to that, so we’ll only find out after it’s over. Yes, we met both of our deadlines. Next is waiting to hear if either of the two festivals we’re submitted to takes the film. On Friday we go to this French town Belfort for the weekend to try to get the post-production grant that we so desperately need/hope for. The mind reading thing was a tough choice, right? Which is why I guess I just took the cheap thrill money getting option. Poor love, or poor people who stand downwind from love, more like. Love making a short documentary film about the loneliest boy on earth, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yep. ‘A cocked hat’, that’s a nice turn of phrase. Gilbert and George are Tories? But then again, yeah, I guess they would be. ** Bill, Right? Pre-AI and even pre-Photoshop so it has to be real. Where are you going this time? I think Sound Furies must be Derek White’s project, yeah. I’d like to meet that guy some day. Nice about the Gluck event. He’ll be there doing a launch and showing his ceramics in January. His book’s on its way here, I’m told. ** Misanthrope, Almost the ideal post response from you. So close. I think I know who you mean, piss therapy user and commenter-wise, but I’m not 100% certain. Sypha, right? Ha ha. Oh, Thanksgiving, that old thing. Shredding rock music can be a breath of fresh air or the polar opposite. Knowing you, bring earplugs. Rain rain here too. I’d choose an elsewhere where it’s snowing personally. ** Steve Erickson, The Playboy Carti cancellation news came from the venue, so no know reason. John might tell me, but he does like being cagey too. They just announced a Paul Vecchiali retrospective here, and I’ll take advantage. How was ‘May December’? I fear I’ve pretty much lost all interest in Haynes’s fiction films at this point. ** MIKA, Hi, MIKA! Oh, you are working on a new book, great!! It sounds amazing and delicious. I can’t wait. Fanboy twiddling his fingers over here. I hope your week is already paying way off. Best, Dennis. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. Warhol’s Oxidation paintings are among the few paintings by him that don’t just make my eyes go numb from overexposure at this point. Lovely backstory. See, now, he actually seemed to give a shit and be trying something completely new with those paintings. Thanks a lot, man. ** 🏋️‍♂️🤸‍♂️🤹‍♂️darbz, Festive! That artist’s works in general are very much in keeping with that painting I posted, so, if you liked it, I’d think you’d like his stuff in general. Nice about the extended training hours. I’ll look up Phluid and check out their things. Duct tape hurts, yeah. Just ask the slaves, although I think they like to ouch. Ouch! Oh, wait, there’s Phluid link, thanks. Oh, wait, it didn’t work. I just got code. I’ll find it, no worries. You’ve been here a year? That’s wild. Time is so fucking weird. It’s hard to believe. Yay, happy anniversary to us both. I’m sure I’d like any version of you as long as that version treated you well. I’m nothing but happy that Thanksgiving is an absolute non-entity over here. Thrilled, I tell you. Are you gonna eat some vegan product sculptured into a dead turkey or anything? Not me. ** Okay. Today I give you 20 short films that I’m guessing most of your haven’t seen before, but what do I know about you really. Not a lot in most cases. That’s it. See you tomorrow.