Date: 10 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
BREAKING THE FRAME
Wednesday 10 October 2012, at 8pm
London ICA Cinema 1
Marielle Nitoslawska, Breaking the Frame, Canada, 2012, 100 min
Breaking the Frame is the first feature-length documentary on Carolee Schneemann, an artist whose pioneering work has transformed discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. In cinema history, she is primarily known for Fuses, an honestly explicit film of lovemaking from a feminine viewpoint shot between 1964-67. For decades, Schneemann has similarly challenged taboos in other media, making paintings, performances, video, collage and installations in which personal experiences are absolutely entwined with formal considerations: ‘Form is emotion. I work towards metaphors of sensation, a dramatization of loss and recovery.’ Her kinetic performance style, developed while a key member of the Judson Dance Theater, produced pieces such as Meat Joy, Up To And Including Her Limits and Interior Scroll, now regarded as seminal works of live art. In this mesmerising film, which forgoes chronological biography, the artist generously shares her memories and extraordinary personal archive. Mark Webber.
Also Screening: Friday 19 October 2012, at 9pm, BFI Southbank NFT 3
PROGRAMME NOTES
BREAKING THE FRAME
Wednesday 10 October 2012, at 8pm
London ICA Cinema 1
BREAKING THE FRAME
Marielle Nitoslawska, Canada, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 100 min
Breaking the Frame is a comprehensive portrait of the ground-breaking multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann. A central figure in twentieth century avant-garde movements, Schneemann expanded the definition of art and art practice to include discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. A pioneer of performance art, she is also an accomplished painter, poet, installation artist and filmmaker.
Giving Schneemann space to tell her own story and share her thoughts, recollections and mediations on her life and work, Nitoslawska traces an intimate course though the artist’s iconic oeuvre. The film demonstrates the diversity of her enormous artistic achievement and opens the work to renewed contemplation. A critical meditation on the relation of art to the physical, domestic and conceptual aspects of daily life as well as the structure and attributes of memory, Breaking the Frame itself pushes the formal boundaries of documentary filmmaking.
Eschewing standard chronologies, the film couples descriptive and self-reflexive modalities as it interweaves aesthetic and political reflection on the feminist body as a site for reframing art’s histories. Deftly weaving archival images with contemporary footage of Schneemann’s journals, paintings and rural home, Nitoslawska captures the multi-dimensionality of the artist’s work. By highlighting the sheen of photographic prints, the fibres of diary pages and the gloss of wet paint, she provides a textured mise-en-scene that resonates with Schneemann’s corporeal focus. The visual composition of the film is complemented by a soundtrack replete with the music of James Tenney. The late composer was Schneemann’s companion and collaborator for many years, and the two remained close friends until his death in 2006.
(Images Festival)
I first saw Schneemann’s Fuses in my early twenties. While researching my film Bad Girl, I began dreaming up a sequel of sorts, with a focus on Schneemann. We met while she was renting a Montréal studio and discussed a possible film. When I visited her in New York, I knew it would happen. Her house, garden and pond were innately cinematographic in the setting sun and rising magic hour. I began digging into her well of archives, realizing it perhaps has no bottom. So began Breaking The Frame. The greatest asset of independent filmmaking is time. This process lasts years; a way of working that isn’t practical but yields irreplaceable authenticity. You observe, collect and wonder how to evoke the ‘past’ in the flow of cinema’s ever-virtual ‘present’. You displace space and fragment time. You listen. You follow the mind’s eye.
(Marielle Nitoslawska)
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