[Frameworks] Magic Lantern Presents: BODY/VOICE: Women's Experimental Cinema (3/13)

[Watter, Seth]

[image: Inline image 1]

Image from *Iris* by Maria Lassnig. Courtesy of Sixpack Films.


Magic Lantern Presents

*BODY / VOICE*

*Women's Experimental Cinema*


March 13, 2014

8 PM

Cable Car Cinema & Cafe

Providence, RI

$5


Curated by Seth Watter


It is often noted that men and women inhabit space very differently, as
evidenced by the popular Tumblr account, Men Taking Up Too Much Space on
the Train <http://mentakingup2muchspaceonthetrain.tumblr.com/>. Photo after
photo show male passengers with legs maximally splayed and arms raised to
grasp a Very Important Newspaper, while women demurely cross their arms and
legs with visible signs of discomfort. It doesn't take a professional
philosopher or sociologist to realize that this stark contrast between
spatial expansion and contraction is not a fact of biology but a set of
learned behaviors. For most women, something has broken in the unifying
chain of consciousness/body/world; an institutionalized double standard
ensures that men enjoy the lion's share of free, unhindered, fluid movement
in space. The films in this program demonstrate various ways in which women
filmmakers have sought to engage more fully with their world, oscillating
between the savage critique of social norms and the affirmation of new
powers and pleasures. It goes without saying that cinema, with its
disjuncture of image and sound, its capacity for metamorphosis and even the
grotesque, is one of the most powerful tools we have for the
reconfiguration of body and voice.


Body/Voice is screened in conjunction with the Feminist and Women's Media
Festival. More information available at
http://feministwomensmediafestival.tumblr.com/.


*FEATURING:* *She/Va* by Marjorie Keller, *Marasmus* by Betzy Bromberg &
Laura Ewig, *Schmeerguntz* by Gunvor Nelson, *Roseblood* by Sharon Couzin, *Not
a Jealous Bone* by Cecelia Condit, *Aberrant Motion #1* by Cathy Sisler,
*Iris* by Maria Lassnig, *SHARONY!* by Jennet Thomas, *Headache* by Aneta
Grzeszykowska.


TRT: approx. 104 mins.


[image: Inline image 2]

Image from *Headache*, courtesy of Raster Gallery, Warsaw.


*Marjorie Keller, She/Va, 1973, 3 mins, color/silent, 16mm*

"A young dancer rechoreographed through film editing. This film was
originally made in standard 8mm, from a home movie" (Filmmakers Coop).


*Betzy Bromberg & Laura Ewig, Marasmus, 1981, 24 mins, color/sound, 16mm*

"If there are certain iconic images that represent the obscure history of
the American avant-garde cinema, one of them has to be from *Marasmus*... The
image is of a woman's face pressed flat, white and distorted against glass,
two hands splayed on each side. She could be pushing against an invisible
boundary, or easing through a clear membrane as if being born; either way,
the image exemplifies L.A.-based Bromberg's uncanny ability for uniting a
philosophical perspective and an almost mythically emotional sensitivity.
Like some of the best feminist experimental work of the 1980s and '90s,
Bromberg's films invariably reverberate in this space in between, refusing
both the cheerless material analysis of one strand of experimental
production and the politically disengaged poetic investigation advocated in
other camps of the avant-garde. Instead, her films play on multiple levels,
merging politics and poetry, and reveling in the resultant tensions. With
*Marasmus*, Bromberg merges strange and abject images of confinement and
escape with a coldly technological environment, and she pits the desire for
continuity and coherence against the pure pleasure of drifting through
images" (Holly Willis, LA Weekly).


*Gunvor Nelson, Schmeerguntz, 1966, 14 mins, b&w/sound, 16mm*

"*Schmeerguntz* is one long raucous belch in the face of the American Home.
A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface
deserves to have such films as *Schmeerguntz* shown everywhere--in every
PTA, every Rotary Club, every club in the land. For it is brash enough,
brazen enough and funny enough to purge the soul of every harried American
married woman" (Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly).


*Sharon Couzin, Roseblood, 1974, 8 mins, color/sound, 16mm*

"Probably more than any other Couzin film, *Roseblood* is influenced by
that tradition in which Maya Deren worked. Couzin makes concrete the
fleeting images of subjective experience. Like Deren, she uses a dancer's
body to create dream-like impressions, explore a woman's movements in
space, and make physical an ethereal world. Also like Deren, Couzin
explores dream states, studies the stylized movements of ritual, and
symbolically evokes myth. *Roseblood* focuses on the sensuality of the
female body and on the artist's vision of the relation between women and
nature. Consciousness of the external world of nature leads to a quest for
self-awareness. Exploring nature becomes a metaphor for exploring the self
and the unconscious. As in a dream, links are formed through the
juxtaposition of the body with the imagery of our cultural mythology about
female sexuality, forming the basis of *Roseblood*'s meditation on women,
nature, physical movement, and dream" (Gina Marchetti and Carol Slingo,
Jump Cut).


*Cecelia Condit, Not a Jealous Bone, 1987, 11 mins, color/sound, DVD*

"A magical bone that promises eternal life propels the story of *Not a
Jealous Bone*, a post-Freudian fairy tale in the guise of a musical
narrative. An eighty-two-year-old woman in search of her mother and a
beautiful young woman struggle over the life-extending magic bone. Condit
holds an unflinching mirror to subconscious fears of mortality and the
cultural stigma of aging for women, as she manifests dark fantasies of
physical deterioration and the primal conflicts between mother and
daughter. Tongue-in-cheek candor and ironic pop references are tempered
with poignancy. Accompanied by a woman's disarming musical narration, this
whimsical psychological melodrama of vanity, jealousy and loss unmasks the
trauma of the aging body, and posits a resolution in a reassertion of the
female self" (EAI).


*Cathy Sisler, Aberrant Motion #1, 1993, 11 mins, b&w/sound, DVD*

"In a series of four short, arresting videos entitled *Aberrant Motion*,
Sisler explores the powers and dangers of deviant movement as interruption.
Sisler's videos record performances where she uses her (lesbian) body as an
intervention in the everyday flow of 'normal' traffic, pedestrians,
thought. *Aberrant Motion #1* begins with a figure of a spinning woman (the
artist) at a busy Montreal intersection. The degraded video image,
strangely arresting, documents the pedestrians' responses to Sisler's large
body clothed in an oversized man's coat, her short haircut and 'aberrant
motion'... For Sisler, walking/staggering is more than a metaphor--an
ontology, the deployment of the (deviant) body in space, a series of
unpredictable, awkward and beautiful, sometimes hostile interactions"
(Julianne Pidduck, "New Queer Cinema and Experimental Video").


*Maria Lassnig, Iris, 1971, 10 mins, color/sound, 16mm on DVD*

"Women's bodies are presented as ambiguous erotic landscapes, sometimes
classically baroque, sometimes cubistic visions in a distorted reflection,
depending on the camera angle and shot size. Finally the female flesh frees
itself to the accompaniment of electronic smacking noises and, ignoring all
gender borderlines, unites with itself in Cronenbergesque growths" (Maya
McKechneay).


*Jennet Thomas, SHARONY!, 2000, 11 mins, color/sound, DVD*

"This is the story of two young girls who dig up a tiny woman from the back
garden. They incubate her in their mouths, in their bed, they lock her in a
dolls house wallpapered with pornography to make her grow up faster,
feeding her through a tube in the door. When she is life-sized and ready to
play they take her to the disco. A dark, comic, experimental fantasy on the
implications of Little Girls Toys--with the existential melancholy of
Frankenstein's monster" (JT). "... as sly and loving an evocation of
formative fantasies and rituals as Todd Haynes's *Dottie Gets Spanked*...
Commissioned by an English art gallery, *Sharony!* was subsequently
uninvited by a distressed curator" (Dennis Lim, Village Voice).


*Aneta Grzeszykowska, Headache, 2008, 12 mins, b&w/sound, digital video*

"The film *Headache* is an attempt to put life in order again, a
sophisticated, existential choreography, which at each moment strikes a
different stylistic tone: grotesque animation, surrealistic phantasmagoria,
corporal play reminding us of experiments in body art. In time with
music--which is a variation of chosen fragments of Krzysztof Penderecki's
pieces from the 60's--the dance pantomime is taking place and tells us the
story of self-destructive impulses of the body, the story that reaches its
conclusion with a deceptive happy end... *Headache* begins with a take where
we stand face to face with the artist holding a stick of dynamite in her
mouth and igniting the fuse. After the explosion, her body returns as a
disjointed set of fragments--legs, arms, torso, head--which begin a life of
their own; a life autonomous to the extent that at some point they 'rebel'
against the head. They attack it violently, hitting and kicking, and
finally compose a new Aneta, with legs in the place of arms and arms in the
place of legs--quasi goddess, quasi monster" (Museum of Modern Art Poland).


Magic Lantern is generously supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
and the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies at Brown
University.


http://www.magiclanterncinema.com
https://www.facebook.com/events/528594320588820/
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