Posts Tagged ‘Amy Greenfield’

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.

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Mata Hari, an erotic dancer and courtesan, was executed by firing squad for double espionage in World War I. After her death, she was decapitated, her body donated to anatomical study, and her head displayed at the Musee d’Anatomie in Paris. In her latest short, How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, filmmaker Amy Ruhl takes Mata Hari’s tragic ending and reimagines her as a strip tease artist whose ability to remove her head takes Belle Époche Paris by storm. Using Oscar Wilde’s Salome as a site for narrative and historical interaction, the film draws upon the cultural phenomenon of “Salomania” among largely lesbian and bisexual female performers in order to engage with an era when Orientalism sold, scandal became success, and deviant desires equaled a crime punishable by death.

For her Kinetic Cinema program, Ruhl will show How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, using the film as a site to examine how the female body, under the unique technology of cinema, has been the primary source of spectacle since the beginnings of film. Ruhl’s work engages with sources ranging from George Méliès’ “trick films,” to Nazimova’s Salome (Dance of the Seven Veils) to Vera Chytilova’s phantasmagoria scene in Daisies, one of the most lauded Czech new wave films. She will present examples of these influences and discuss how they have informed How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body which was made in part by collaging early film footage together with live action animation.

The program will open with two shorts by contemporary experimental filmmakers, Kerrie Welsh and Amy Greenfield.

Kerrie Welsh’s Peter, Peter… is a dark retelling of the children’s rhyme “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,” that illustrates the disparity between the narratives we construct and the realities they represent.

Amy Greenfield’s Wildfire is the final film in her acclaimed Club Midnight film cycle and depicts women “clothed” in electronically generated flaming colors, reincarnating Thomas Edison’s 1894 hand-tinted film, Annabelle Dances.

Both filmmakers will join Ruhl for a lively discussion with the audience.

Monday, May 7th, 7:30pm

$9 suggested donation – Tickets

Uniondocs
322 Union Avenue (at Maujer Street)
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Trains:
L train to Lorimer street
G to Metropolitan Ave
J train to Hewes Street

Go to our website for more information on the rest of our Kinetic Cinema season.

Anthology Film Archives presents an event celebrating the book release of FLESH INTO LIGHT: THE FILMS OF AMY GREENFIELD by ROBERT HALLER on Monday, April 30th 2012 at 7pm.

The event includes a screening of Greenfield’s pioneering cine-dance and video-dance works that span 40 years and features the premiere of BODYSONGS, a work commissioned by WGBH TV in 1979 and made in collaboration with cinema verité filmmaker Richard Leacock. At the time Greenfield and Leacock shot a clothed version and a nude version of their film, but both ended up being banned from broadcast. When Leacock passed away in 2011, Greenfield revisited the nude video dance footage, restored it on today’s technology, and found in it a new concept of timeless nude duets as moving image art: BodySongs.

Other films on the program include MUSEic Of The BODy (2010), edited from Greenfield’s 1994 multimedia performance with video art pioneer Nam June Paik, the underground classic Element, and Wildfire from Greenfield’s acclaimed Club Midnight film cycle.

Greenfield and Haller will be present to answer questions and sign Flesh into Light at the reception following the screening.

In Flesh Into Light, Haller articulates the essential principles of cine-dance through Greenfield’s films, which re-invent dance as fundamental human motion not just for the camera, but as and inseparable from cinema. “For Greenfield, the body moving with and against the close-up camera can be the concrete image of inner human nature, an instrument for its expression and a vessel containing images and actions that crystalize the meanings and mysteries of experience: movement and memory, the past and the present moment.” – Robert Haller, Flesh Into Light

Admission is $9. No reservations required.

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. (@ 2nd Street)
Manhattan, New York.

Click here for more information on tickets.

Also of Note: Amy Greenfield will be present at Movement Media’s next Kinetic Cinema event on May 7th at Uniondocs, screening her film Wildfire and taking part in the discussion.

Camera Operation and Shooting Strategies with Amy Greenfield & Jeremiah Story

Amy Greenfield

DNA (Dance New Amsterdam)
280 Broadway, Studio 6 (entrance on Chambers)
New York, NY 10007
212.625.8369

October 12, 2011
7:30-10:00pm

Topics will include: basic understanding of camera operation, shooting strategies, and concrete concepts and methods to enable artists to have a more formalized approach to their filming process.

$10 for Dance Films Association or DNA Members; $25 fee for Non-Members.

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

For more information visit the Dance Films Association website

Next Dance Film Lab events:

November 7- Dance Film Lab Screening

November 19 & 20- Moviehouse presents: Curated Screening of works by Dance Film Lab Participants

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.