Friday, March 28, 2014

4/2/14 The works of Keller, Strand, and Brakhage


Soft Fiction by Chick Strand 1979 16mm bl&wh
"Chick Strand's SOFT FICTION is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. The title SOFT FICTION works on several levels. It evokes the soft line between truth and fiction that characterizes Strand's own approach to documentary, and suggests the idea of softcore fiction, which is appropriate to the film's erotic content and style. It's rare to find an erotic film with a female perspective dominating both the narrative discourse and the visual and audio rhythms with which the film is structured. Strand continues to celebrate in her brilliant, innovative personal documentaries her theme, the reaffirmation of the tough resilience of the human spirit." -- Marsha Kinder, Film Quarterly

Blue Moses by Stan Brakhage1962 16mm bl&wh
A meat enigma spoken in eternal language of director, con man, and magician. It's about the sham flesh that men create to dam the streaming of the truth from their muscles and senses... a molecule of revelation in the shape of a drama thrown off by the artist between ANTICIPATION and DOG STAR MAN. -- Michael McClure. A manifesto of film epistemology in the form of an actor n conflict with the camera eye. -- Brussels catalogue. Brussels International Film Festival, 1964.

Herein Marjorie Keller 1991 16mm color sound
Keller's final film, charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling.
An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman's autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side, street prostitution & drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space & history.
Experimental filmmaker, author, activist, film scholar, and cultural worker Marjorie Keller (1950-1994) created a uniquely personal and feminist body of work for twenty years beginning in the early 1970s.
Keller also served on the board of directors of the Collective for Living Cinema, was the founding editor of their journal, Motion Picture from 1984 to 1987 and was Director of the New York Filmmakers Cooperative in the late 1980s. Writer J. Hoberman called her "an unselfish champion of the avant-garde." Her films deftly combine home movie and diary styles through a potent politicized lens.