Filmmaker Amy Ruhl is fascinated by the body in film, particularly when it becomes mutated, dismembered or perverted by the cinematic medium. For her Kinetic Cinema program presented this past Monday at Uniondocs in Brooklyn, she focused on the rich history of the female body in film, especially that most intriguing of female archetypes, the femme fatale.

In her first short film, “How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body” Ruhl reimagines the famous courtesan and spy as if she lived her life the way it ended (by execution with her body donated to science and her head put on display at the Musée d’Anatomie). Ruhl’s Mata Hari is quite literally a person split in her allegiances – between mind and body, warring countries, sexualities, high and low art. There was no reconciling her contradictions, and in trying to have everything both ways, she enraged the very public she was trying to seduce and was destroyed.

While Mata Hari’s career was spent mostly in the service of men, she really yearned for artistic legitimacy and coveted the role of Salomé (played by many lesbian performers of the time). Ruhl showed the ‘Dance of the 7 Veils’ from Alla Nazimova’s Salomé and explained the allure of the part this way:

“This clip illustrates my favorite part of the [Oscar Wilde] play, which is that everyone in the play is looking at another character and desiring them, but that character never looks back at them… King Herod is looking at Salomé very lecherously and his wife [Queen Herodia] is saying ‘Don’t look at her!’…Salome is looking at John the Baptist, who won’t look at anyone but up toward God, because he has this annoying piety…I think that it’s a really amazing, on Oscar Wilde’s part, critique of the sexual roles going on at that time in Victorian England, where nobody gets to have what they actually want…and this role really spoke to a lot of lesbian performers.”

In addition to Ruhl’s film and curated selections, two other experimental filmmakers, Amy Greenfield and Kerrie Welsh showed shorts and took part in the discussion.

Amy Greenfield’s Wildfire was made from footage shot of a multimedia, avant gard strip show. After looking at the footage of the show, she wanted to show a thread between her work and the early films Thomas Edison made of female performers dancing in the style of Loie Fuller, the most famous of which is Annabelle Dances. Made in 1894, Annabelle Dances is of Annabelle in a costume of billowing fabric that she swirled and moved in undulating and serpentine ways. The film was hand tinted in different colors to simulate the lighting effects of live stage shows. Greenfield opens her film with footage of Edison’s Annabelle Dances and dissolves into her modern version with nude women whirling fabric. The video was also hand tinted in a similar way to the early film and the rapidly shifting edits make the images whirl past the viewers eyes giving a spinning sensation to the watcher.

Kerrie Welsh’s Peter, Peter… draws from the aesthetic of home movies in the 1950s, and starts out showing a typical nuclear family in a nondescript suburb where everything is “hunky dory”. The mood quickly shifts as the pretty wife has an extramarital affair and the father goes into a jealous rage.  A dark retelling of the children’s rhyme, “Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well,” Welsh’s film shows everything that would never be included  in a  typical family home movie, and incases it all in a shell of normalcy.

Kerrie Welsh, Amy Greenfield, Anna Brady Nuse (moderator), and Amy Ruhl

The three filmmakers shared a mutual interest in the history of feminism in film, and a desire open up roles for women (and ways of interpreting those roles).

Greenfield commented, “What interests me, is living through 1980’s feminism, that what we’re doing, using the female erotic, not rejecting any aspect of the female and cinema, was a no no then – I was very persecuted. But audiences are coming around again to my films and it’s a wonderful time for seeing films like this.”

Kerrie Welsh replied, “One of the things I think is interesting [about Ruhl’s film], is the way it is engaging with all of these historical moments in a way that is also engaging with the film medium. So when you talk about the female erotic, I feel like [Ruhl’s Mata Hari] is really using performance, she’s using her own body, in a way that is referencing not some natural female eroticism, but all of these difference modes of performance that have been naturalized  or associated with sexuality in various ways. I think the questioning of that in this really funny weird way is what speaks to me about the film.”

Ruhl explained that while Mata Hari never worked in film herself, she became a rich subject for other great actresses who depicted her on screen, including Theda Bera, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

“What really interested me [about Mata Hari] was that she really defined this subset of femme fatale.”

Related articles:

• “Mata Hari, the Technologized Body: A Conversation with Amy Ruhl” by Kerrie Welsh, On-Verge
• http://www.uniondocs.org/2012-05-07-kinetic-cinema-with-amy-ruhl/
• Amy Ruhl on Vimeo
• Amy Greenfield articles in Move the Frame
• Flesh into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield, by Robert Haller Intellect Press.

Edited by Douglas Rosenberg and Claudia Kappenberg, this issue also features a report on the recent Screendance Symposium in Brighton by Claudia Kappenberg and Sarah Whatley.

Dance New Amsterdam Theater
February 20, 2012 7:30 pm
$10 for DFA or DNA Members; $25 for Non-Members

Google Map
280 Broadway (entrance on 35 Chambers), New York, NY, United States, 10007

RSVP to brighid@dancefilms.org with Dance Film Lab in the subject line to reserve your place.

Screening excerpts of the key films that every filmmaker should know.  Focusing both on dance film and “traditional” films, this masterclass gives attendees an overview of development of film techniques, aesthetics and idioms, and discussion of concepts and the development of the cinematic form.

Instructor: Alla Kovgan
Alla Kovgan is a Boston-based filmmaker, born in Moscow (Russia). Her films and films that she co-directed have been presented worldwide including at the Sundance, Rotterdam, Toronto, Melbourne, Durban, Oberhausen, Clemont-Ferrand, MOMA, Louvre, Centre Pompidou, PBS (US), ZDF (Germany) and numerous others. Alla’s most recent film NORA (2008), her collaboration with the British filmmaker David Hinton, is an art film – a poetic biography of the Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire. NORA has been an official selection of over 80 festivals, received 23 awards and will be broadcast on PBS in 2010. The two latest documentaries, which Alla co-directed and edited, an Emmy-nominated “Traces of the Trade” (2007) and “My perestroika” (2009) premiered at Sundance and on P.O.V. (PBS). Since 1999, Alla has been involved into interdisciplinary collaborations – creating intermedia performances (with KINODANCE Company), dance films and documentaries about dance such as “Movement (R)evolution Africa” (with Joan Frosch). Alla’s projects have been supported by Open Society Institute, LEF Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Bank of America Celebrity Series, among others. Since 2000, she has taught and curated dance film and avant-garde cinema worldwide as the Programmer of St. Petersburg Dance Film Festival KINODANCE (Russia) and as a co-Curator of Balagan Film Series (Boston). In 2009, Alla was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and a Brother Thomas Fellowship for artists working at a high level of excellence and creativity.

Performa 11, one of two new festivals in NYC that defy artistic boundaries post-9/11

Like many people, the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11 brought up many “What if’s” for me. What would my life be like now if 9/11 hadn’t happened? What would my art look like? What would the fields of dance and dance film look like? And then after being baffled by those questions, I started to think about what actually did happen. How did September 11th, 2001 change my views of my artistic work, and my chosen field of dance?

For me, I wonder if I would have become obsessed with dance for the camera. Without the traumas of 9/11 and the political and cultural awakening it inspired in me, I might not have felt such an urgent need to seek other outlets for artistic expression. In an uncertain world, film and new media gave me hope that my artistic work could make a difference in the world. The feelings of mortality that were triggered by 9/11 made me desperate to be able to create work that would last (ie be able to be watched repeatedly) and the rage and violence that has surrounded the event (and still does to this day) gave me an urgent need communicate with people outside of my tiny circle of acquaintances. I felt that if we were to reconcile with our enemies and restore stability to our lives, then we had to start communicating and learning about each other. Live performance was too limiting for me, I needed to tap into media, and thankfully with the rise of broadband internet that became more possible than ever before.

Looking around at the greater effects of 9/11 on the arts and dance in particular, I can see that I was not the only one looking outside of my discipline at that time. One of the biggest art trends of the last ten years is the movement towards interdisciplinary work. Everywhere you turn you see all the arts mixing and intermingling. Dance in particular has become almost ubiquitous in art museums and gallery spaces. The Guggenheim started the highly popular Works & Process series that has presented many dance companies over the years. The Whitney’s Biennials are peppered with dance works, and smaller museum and gallery spaces such as P.S. 1, Chelsea Art Museum and Location One are hotbeds of interdisciplinary artistic activity. I commonly read artist bios that say “choreographer, dancer, and visual artist” (such as those of Ralph Lemon, Shen Wei, Tony Orrico, and Yvonne Rainer to name a few). Likewise, many visual artists repeatedly incorporate dance into their work (such as Kelly Nipper, Julia Mandle, Christian Marclay, and Isaac Julien).

Curators have had a huge influence on this shift to a post-disciplinary era. Two of the most progressive festivals to have emerged in New York after 9/11 are FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, and Performa. Both were born in the mid 00’s to advance boundary-defying artistic practices through commissions and presentations. Crossing the Line has an emphasis on French and American artistic exchange, however it keeps a very broad view of what that exchange could entail. Performa was founded by Roselee Goldberg, a leading authority on performance art since the ‘70’s, whose festival’s mission is “dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century.”

Both Performa and Crossing the Line have pioneered new curatorial approaches to performance presentation, that revolve more around central ideas and less on the particular art forms that are on display. In this year’s Crossing the Line Festival program, the events are grouped around 3 curatorial perspectives: “Fiction & Non-Fiction”, “Lecture/Performance” series, and “Endurance/Resistance/Inspiration.” Within these categories are works that incorporate all the art forms and most of them are interdisciplinary, such as choreographer Kelly Bartosik’s “i like penises: a little something in 24 acts” that involves a dialogue between three dancers and a visual artist that perform live alongside each other in layered scenes. Performa endeavors to single out the influence of performance on the visual arts, both past and present. This leads to programming that is by nature interdisciplinary as multiple art forms collide and are influenced by each other within the works, such as choreographer Boris Charmatz’s “Musée de la Danse (Dancing Museum): Expo Zéro,” an exhibition that takes place in empty rooms and includes both real and imagined performance.

After 9/11, artists – particularly in New York City – suffered on many levels. We experienced rage, sorrow, and exasperation as our nation inflicted violence and war on innocent people while using every excuse to devalue the arts – the very lifeblood of culture that restores humanity and compassion in the world. Despite this, I believe that amazing growth has taken place in the arts that has led artists to see beyond boundaries and closed-mindedness within our own communities, and forced us to grapple with the world in a way that is collaborative, healing and ultimately life-affirming. I believe in the power of artists to regenerate a fractured and ailing world no matter what happens and under any circumstances. As much as I wonder how my life could have been easier and better if the events on 9/11 hadn’t occurred, I am so thankful that I was driven to explore the medium of film, and the infinite artistic riches that lay there for me.

FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival is taking place now until October 16^th at venues all over New York City.

Performa 11 will take place November 1–21, 2011 in New York City.

Anna Brady Nuse is a dance filmmaker and director of Pentacle’s Movement Media. Examples of her work can be seen here.

This ground-breaking video collection, just launched on March 28th, has been designed to draw users into the Jacob’s Pillow Archive and make it easy and fun to navigate through the site. One can start out looking at Kyle Abraham, and then a few clicks later be watching Shantala Shivalingappa and Anna Duncan from 1942. For a dance lover, this site could start to consume as much of your time as Facebook or Twitter.

From a technical point of view, the site is surprisingly sophisticated behind its clean and simple looking design. Users can access videos via four main pathways: Artist, Genre, Era, and Guess (a fun quiz that tests user’s dance literacy). Each video is only one minute long, which provides just enough time to make you want to see more (while keeping them within Fair Use Law and avoiding a lot of legal hassle). For now, there is no advanced search function where you can type in an artist’s name or key word and get results, but this will most likely be added when more content has been uploaded. For now, the site functions to give users a taste of the archives and encourage them to visit them in person on site if they want to really delve into the artist or the material.

Dance Interactive started as a physical kiosk on-site at Jacob’s Pillow for people to be able to peruse the archives without having to go in and bother an intern to get out the works. The original Dance Interactive was designed as a touch screen, and the site today has kept that tactile feeling so it translates well to the iPad and other tablet and mobile devices. As one can imagine, selecting a one minute clip from each artist would be difficult, and Norton Owen, Jacob’s Pillow Director of Preservation is responsible for selecting all of the excerpts and writing thoughtful text descriptions that help contextualize the content. Given the vastness of the task, for now the Virtual Pillow Team is aiming to upload a video a week as well as include all current and future programming as it happens at the Pillow.

The video content itself is beautifully shot and looks great on screen. Many of the clips are viewable in HD and can be projected for a classroom presentation without looking too pixelated. On the backend, the site was built on Drupal and designed by ClearMetrics, NYC. All the video is hosted by Vimeo, which gives it stability and flexibility for customizing the player and changing the files easily.

In an era when to exist at all means to exist online, Jacob’s Pillow’s Dance Interactive has breathed new life into dance history for audiences everywhere. Although this collection only represents dance that has passed through Jacob’s Pillow, I hope that it inspires many other dance institutions to dust off their vaults and open up their archives to become part of the living networked world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

TenduTv/Marc Kirschner’s Essential Dance Film compilation is set for release on 9/14 in the US (iTunes, Amazon, CinemaNow) and Canada (iTunes). This collection will be the first non-documentary dance program on the iTunes platform. Pricing will be $14.99 to purchase, $3.99 to rent in the US. More information can be found at http://www.facebook.com/dancefilm.

For her Kinetic Cinema program, LIQUID FILMS, cinedance pioneer, Amy Greenfield, takes dance into the water in a splash of amazing classic and neo cine-dance from 1903 to the 21st century, to transform the very nature of dance as only a screen medium can. Anna Brady Nuse interviewed Amy to find out why this theme, “Liquid”  excites her:

Liquid is sexy and always in motion and catches the light. It dances. And I found over the years so many liquid cinedances I love and feel connected to because of my own film “Tides”. And I thought how great it would be to see them all flow together.

Tides

They break boundaries which I feel still need to be broken in the field – there’s no way you can take dance and a camera into the water and not have kinetic cinema. And the definition of dance itself changes, becomes re-united with natural movement and at the same time transformed in the liquid flow, breaking totally with a tradition of dance vocabulary. All of these qualities are wonderful for cinematic material – they deal with color and light in relation to the body in motion on a cinematic level – a dynamic, unpredictable flow for both dance and camera. I feel that too much screen dance is static, and flat and unaware of the essence of cinema, which is light in motion, and how it can replace the third dimension with a transposed heightened plasticity.

“Nymph Of The Waves” was one of the first liquid cinedances, and is now an early film classic, and was perhaps the first use of a superimposition in the history of cinema. The connection was made right at the beginning, because it was a natural fit. One of Isadora Duncan’s great sources of inspiration was the movement of the ocean, but only with cinema could dance and the rhythms and motion and world of water come together and be communicated.

Your program spans the entire history of cinema. How have technological changes affected filmmakers’ treatment of this subject – water and the moving body?

To me what’s marvelous is what we do with the technology we have. Technology itself changes the kinds of films we can make but not the quality.

Yet it’s wonderful that now an individual filmmaker can successfully shoot with a light portable video camera of high enough quality underwater for a not staggering price tag. When Reifenstahl made the diving sequence from “Olympia” she had to invent technology to shoot it – gigantic cameras with a gigantic crew. But here are underwater dance films being made one-on-one, and we feel the intimacy, as in “Rapt”. And Elle Burchill can be the filmmaker and underwater dancer herself, an autobiographic cinedance. And Ben Dolphin shoots digitally with the high speed Phantom camera which can create slower than slow motion, a camera he uses for shooting TV commercials, here used for an experimental, personal cinedance.

In your film, “Tides”, the choreography of the camera is as integrated as the movement of the body being filmed. How did you direct this duet and then shape it in the editing?

I’d worked with Hilary Harris before in my film “Element” which is the mate to “Tides”. By the time we made “Tides” we almost communicated by osmosis, because we had “Element” as a basis. In “Tides” I wanted him with the Lo Cam handheld, actually standing in the waves himself, experiencing the same movement I was subjected to. And unless the film ran out or I ran out of steam we couldn’t stop, so the communion could build. The physical set-up worked in relation to communicating some key kinetic concepts: the extreme slow-motion, the movement of the camera in flow and counterflow to the human motion, and never losing the essential kinetic point of tension, where the body and ocean met. After the first shoot, looking at and discussing the film rushes became paramount -my pointing out “I want more of that, but more like this” or “I don’t want that” etc. Sometimes I directed with my hands – one hand the human motion, the other hand the camera motion, moving the hands as I wanted the two to symbiotically relate. This sense came from the fact that I had a film image going on on automatic inside my head while I was performing. So when I saw some kind of correspondence in the actual footage to that imaginary ideal film, that’d be great. While Hilary could never be inside my head, sometimes he came close.

The artists on your program represent a great range of filmmaking styles and approaches. Which are most like yours and which are the most different? Have any had an effect on your filmmaking? How?

All the films on the program are different, yet united by the maker truly wedding the surge and flow and weightless state and viscosity to how the camera moves in relation to the mover moving through the water. In that sense I feel a commonness with all the films. I feel close to the daring to expose the nude body in Sara Joel and Jody Oberfelder’s “Rapt”, the kinetic tension combined with slow motion in Ben Dolphin’s “Arising”, the film-maker herself in a journey in the water in “Mother/Daughter”, and when I saw “Immersion” several years ago I felt I wished I could have made a film something like it and felt I’d show it some day.

Arising

But the film-makers which have had the greatest affect on my film-making are Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. Not Deren’s “Study In Choreography For Camera” except for the editing, but the beginning of “At Land”, which had such a direct influence on “Tides”, “Meshes Of The Afternoon” and “Ritual in Transfigured Time” for so many reasons, including the always inner drama coming from the silent language of movement, the border between metaphoric and real, natural movement and unnatural states, the woman’s silent journey, the strictness of structure, the mystery, the intensity. And her writing on film and dance. Kenneth keeps a great deal of this but does away with psychodrama. I hadn’t seen most of his work when I made a lot of my films but I know I was influenced by “osmosis”. He’s so powerful. Mystery and simplicity and the ‘dance’ totally part of the fabric of the film, and between the cuts, everything so cinematically visual/visionary, yet corresponding to some unknown invisible world and force. “Eaux D’Artifice” is a masterpiece. “Tides” was also influenced by Reifenstahl’s Diving Sequence from “Olympia”: the sculptural athleticism of the camera, the off axis turn of the camera, the dramatic point of intersection of body and water, the use of slow motion.

Coming up next at Kinetic Cinema:

Liquid Films

Curated by Amy Greenfield

Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 7:30pm

Tickets: $10

Reservations: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/87612

Films include: “Nymph Of the Waves“, by American Mutoscope and Biograph, one of the first dance films ever made, superimposes the dancer with the ocean waves, as well as Amy Greenfield’s primal “Tides”, with Greenfield and camera operator, Hilary Harris, both braving the ocean tides in their symbiotic camera dance. Kenneth Anger’s restored “Eaux D’Artifice”, with his “Water Witch” in the Tivoli fountain, is one of the great classics of the American avant-garde, and Ben Dolphin’s “Arising” has us flying joyfully with his dancers inside a waterfall, blurring an artificial screen world and the natural world. Jodi Kaplan’s “Immersion”, Jody Oberfelder and Sara Joel’s “Rapt”, Elle Burchill’s “Mother Daughter” and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s “Pulsion” all made recently, are original, daring, entrancing, lyrically beautiful new cine-dances envisioning women moving in real underwater worlds.

Pina Bausch was one of those living legends. Her work has been seen by many. Her influence is felt throughout the dance world, and her memory will live in the history books, although she had already infiltrated them.

Her choreography reached a wider audience when snippets of Cafe Muller was shown in Pedro Almodovar’s film Talk to Her. Bausch’s work had a raw and timeless cloud around it. Her pieces were about “things,” not just one “something.” Metaphor was huge. The relationships between men and women always being dissected and presented to an audience that never knew what exactly they were going to see when she premiered a new work.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the scale of the pieces were unthinkable. Snow falling on stage for a whole second half of a show. A mound of dirt blocking half of the stage. Flowers, chairs, walls, screams, sweat, tears, bruises. All real. Although the visuals were impressive, I do not believe they were ever used to impress upon. I feel that her work was honest and humble. It was ugly and beautiful. If one opened themselves up to the experience of the dancers, they would leave exhausted, but not abused. Bausch was true to her vision and dancers. The audience had to take the role of accepting that and to enjoy the ride, no matter how uncomfortable it might get. The pieces always ended beautifully.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her pieces were made to be seen in grand, large theaters, but the attention that she asked for, and got, from the audience, was that of an intoxicating program on television.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her work, I feel, was living cinematogrophy. There are many clips of her work around the Internet that can be found and enjoyed. But the greatest news is Bausch’s collaboration with famous film director, Wim Wellers Wenders. Before she passed, they announced plans to create and film a retrospective documentary on Bausch, and in 3-D. Wenders had cancelled the production after her death, but through public opinion and the amount of letters he received from lovers of Bausch’s work, he will be continuing on with the project.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A 3-D film on the life and work of Pina Bausch. This might be one of the best gifts that the dance world will receive. And in 3-D!! It might seem cheesy, but personally I have only had the privilege to see one Bausch piece live, and I am welcoming the opportunity to see another, in a way, Bausch original.

If you haven’t read it yet, check out Joan Acocella’s article, “The Faun,” in this week’s New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/29/090629ta_talk_acocella

It’s a really interesting article about Christian Comte, a French artist, who makes animations from still images. Recently he chose Vaslav Nijinsky, the much revered Ballet Russe dancer and choreographer, as his subject, and posted what appeared to be film fragments of the artist on YouTube that were never known to exist before. The appearance of the clips sparked a frenzy of excitement and debate among balletomanes and dance historians.

If you go to his YouTube page you can see all the videos he’s made and all the comments users have left. They have said everything from praise for Compte “finding” these videos, to appreciation of him using his talent to finally bring some idea of Nijinsky’s movements to life, as well as reprimands for him fooling them. He does insist that he is not trying to pass his films off as originals, but the confusion is understandable…sometimes.

Here are couple of Comte’s videos:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’d love to hear your responses to this work and the debate surrounding it.

To celebrate a year’s worth of late nights putting off much-needed sleep to pursue a very bizarre obsession about a very bizarre subject, here are few of my “Greatest Hits”, one for each month of this year.

Phillipine Prisoners Resurrect Busby Berkeley. This was my second post ever, and probably my best to date! I wish I could pull an article like this out everytime I sit down to write!

Viva la dance dance revolution! This was my wild idealist phase

Papelbon Dance I’m actually a Yankee’s fan, but the fact that Jonathan Papelbon has increased dance appreciation around Red Sox Nation is blog-worthy in my book.