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.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

PORCH STORIES, Photo: Gary Tacon

Marta Renzi’s Kinetic Cinema program “Let Me Entertain You” presented at Gibney Dance Center on Thursday March 22nd had a political and moral message behind it’s light title – Making an audience laugh is just as important and necessary a function of art as making them cry, or question, or think.

The evening was centered around a quote from Preston Sturges’ iconic 1941 film “Sullivan’s Travels” in which a Hollywood filmmaker sets out to make a “serious” film about poverty in America during the Depression. After a series of mishaps, the hero is believed to be dead and he ends up in jail, where he truly learns the dehumanizing oppression of poor people. The only light in the whole experience comes when he watches a movie with his fellow inmates, and he finds himself laughing tears of joy at the antics of Disney characters (just the sort of trite entertainment he was critical of when he set out on his journey). At the end of the film he tells his producers he wants to make a comedy, and leaves us with this unforgettable last line: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh! Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan! Boy!”

For filmmaker and choreographer Marta Renzi, this sentiment can be seen throughout her thirty years of art making, in which she has worked with people of all ages, classes, and races, both professional and amateur. Her mandate is to bridge art with real life, and she has done it in laundromats (The Welcome Table), auto mechanic’s garages (Year, Make, Model), neighborhoods (Porch Stories), and rust belt towns (Little Wild Heart) to name a few. In the mini-retrospective she showed at Kinetic Cinema we could clearly see her love for common people. Regardless of technique, budget size, or production elements above all else, Renzi wants to show the virtues of ordinary people in their daily lives, and the acts of celebration, joy, pain and pride that are there if only someone will shine a light on it. Interestingly, Renzi has approached this not as a gritty documentarian, but as an entertainer and a dancer.

In many ways, it is the archetypes of the working person that interest Renzi rather than the specific stories of individuals. In her films dance is a means of turning everyday tasks into ritualized sacred acts that defy normal space and time. In “The Welcome Table” working class black women look like high priestesses of the laundromat. As if by magic, the little white girls whose clothes they are washing appear in a procession through the laundromat and then disappear again, only to reappear in a hidden garden of a crumbling mansion. In Porch Stories the neighborhood characters evoke fairy tale counterparts including a “Pied Piper” old musician being followed by mischievous children, and a “Rapunzel”-like author trapped by her own writer’s block on her porch high on a hill.

Opening the evening was a short improvisatory solo and a video work by Arthur Aviles, a long time friend and performer of Renzi’s. Arthur’s video, “To Be Real” tells the story of a pheasant that was trapped in the Hunts’ Point neighborhood of the Bronx, and how the bird’s release inspired a dance (performed by the beautiful Althea Pace outdoors on the Bronx waterfront). Aviles is also concerned with bridging art with community and creating an atmosphere of inclusion. He is the founder of BAAD! (The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance), in an old factory space in Hunts Point that has become a beacon for creative talent in this notoriously poor and underserved part of the city.

In a world that is polarized by words such as entertainment vs. art, socialism vs. capitalism, liberal vs. conservative, it is so refreshing to see Renzi and Aviles’ work which seems to bridge these dualities and show us how we are all in this “cockeyed caravan” together. That is the beauty of art, especially poetic forms like dance. We can go beyond the either/or’s and see how we are connected in divine and beautiful ways.

To learn more about Marta Renzi and her work go to: martarenzi.blogspot.com.
To learn more about Arthur Aviles go to: www.bronxacademyofartsanddance.org

PORCH STORIES, Photo: Gary Tacon

Kinetic Cinema: Let me Entertain You

Screening and discussion with Marta Renzi

Marta Renzi, an acclaimed choreographer and filmmaker, curates a provocative program of Kinetic Cinema that reveals the real inspiration behind her work, and reminds us of why art matters:

“Asked to share something about why I make dance films, I find myself showing excerpts from feature films that include a prison gang, a drunken orgy, and run the gamut from Greek tragedy to Saturday morning cartoons. To accompany these, I’ve chosen bits from my own dance films featuring characters with everyday lives and actual jobs – nursing aide, garbage collector, fast food worker, bartender – and who dance like it.”

Arthur Aviles, a long time performer and collaborator of Marta’s will open the evening with a video and solo piece of his own.

Marta Renzi has been making dances professionally since 1976.  In 1992, Marta received a New York Dance & Performance Award (a “Bessie”), and in 1995 was the first recipient of a Dancing in the Streets award as “a fearless explorer of all manner of unconventional sites, integrating art into everyday life.” In 1981, she made YOU LITTLE WILD HEART, a half-hour video dance for PBS, followed in 1989 by a second for television entitled MOUNTAINVIEW, made in collaboration with filmmaker John Sayles. Since 2005, she has self-produced several short films which have been screened nationally and internationally.

Arthur Aviles is a Bessie Award-winning dancer and choreographer of Puerto Rican descent. Mr. Aviles was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and toured internationally with the company for eight years 1987 to 1995. In 1996 Mr. Aviles founded Arthur Aviles Typical Theatre (AATT) in Paris and moved the company to the Bronx the same year. In December 1998, he inaugurated a new performance space in the American Banknote Building, a warehouse in the Hunts Points section of the Bronx. His company is the centerpiece of BAAD! – The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.

Kinetic Cinema had a merry time with the Merry Makers last Sunday, February 26^th at Fort Useless.  The night involved video and performances by Jessica Flannigan, Kate Taylor, and the Merry Makers Rachel Sattler and Elizabeth Burwell along with their filmmaker Ethan Duff. Though quite different from one another the three acts were tied together by elements of nostalgia, parody, and feel good comedy.

During the screening of their film “Adventures In Anytown,” Rachel, Elizabeth, Ethan cued us in on their battles with freezing temperatures, venue changes, time cues, costume design and crunch deadlines.  They shared clips from films that influenced the formation of their stage and screen personas including segments from Annie, Moulin Rouge and Lavern and Shirley among others.

To hear of the Merry Makers process from start to finish was inspiring.  It also reminded us of what we already know but sometimes forget, which is that when it comes to art New Yorkers are by your side to make it happen.

Join us for our next Kinetic Cinema event with Marta Renzi on March 22^nd at the Gibney Dance Center.

For more information about the Merry Makers, visit them on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/MerryMakersDance?sk=wall

Kinetic Cinema: “Dance on Camera Extended”

Kinetic Cinema’s Dance on Camera Extended program last Saturday, February 4th, was an intimate yet rich event. After the screening viewers conversed on the diversity in the six films shown that evening, as well as the wide array of films at the Dance on Camera Festival the weekend before. Why do we yearn for an element of surprise in modern dance?  How does a dance film weave in narrative and does it have to be a complete narrative? Is it important to know where a choreographer is from?  Does it change our perspective?  These were just some of the many questions debated.

Thank you to those, including dance film choreographer and director Jody Oberfelder, who came out to join and share their perspective.  As she eloquently said it is conversations like these that make the events so worth it!

Presented in conjunction with CRS and the Dance Films Association.

Come join us for our next Kinetic Cinema, The MerryMakers Make Movies featuring the vaudeville shenanigans and silent films of The MerryMakers at Fort Useless in Brooklyn on Sunday, February 26th at 7pm (doors open at 6:30)!

This Sunday choreographer Aynsley Vandenbroucke will present a screening and discussion at Moviehouse on the ways artists form relationships and navigate their personal lives and their art. The following Sunday dance filmmaker Zena Bibler will teach a down and dirty DIY dance film-making workshop at Green Space Studio in Long Island City.

Exploring Artistic Relationships

A screening and discussion with Aynsley Vandenbroucke

Moviehouse @ 3rd Ward
Sunday November 13th, 7pm Doors and Food, 8pm Screening
$5 suggested donation

In research for her new piece, Vandenbroucke’s program will examine artists’ relationships between personal partnership and artistic practice. From documentaries and films featuring New York based artists like Patti Smith and John Cage, freedom and commitment, presence and absence, public and private, mobility and stability will be questioned and the debate will be recorded.

3rd Ward (map)
195 Morgan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11237
718.715.4961
events@3rdward.com

The One-person Crew: Techniques and strategies for getting it all done yourself

Kinetic Cinema Workshop with Zena Bibler

Green Space
Sunday November 20th, 3-6pm
$30 in advance, $35 at the door

Want to make a dance film but don’t know where to start? In this workshop filmmaker and choreographer, Zena Bibler will teach strategies for making dynamic films through use of camera positioning, perspective, rhythm, and movement composition. This workshop is especially geared towards dance filmmakers interested in filming and editing themselves. Register Now!

Green Space (directions)
37-24 24th St. Suite 301
Long Island City, NY 11101
718.956.3037

On October 21 & 22 the company will premiere their latest performance project, Bound at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, examining the lives of nine individuals living under occupation. For Kinetic Cinema, they will provide a demonstration of their unique working technique with Samar Haddad King live on Skype, along with a curated selection of videos related to Bound.

Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre has been hailed as “awesomely athletic” by Chicago Stage Style, and “Like a ray of light coming out of the arid desert…leaving the audience mesmerized in their seats” by Hussein Daaseh, Al Rai. You can more about their long distance creative process in this article by Jennifer Edwards for the Huffington Post.

Here is a video about the making of Bound.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BOUND

October 21-22, 2011 at 7:30pm

LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Mainstage Theater
31-10 Thomson Ave, Long Island City
7 Train to 33 St/ Rawson St
Tickets: $15 Advance / $20 at the door / $10 Students
www.ysdt.org

Kinetic Cinema with Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre

Saturday December 3rd, 4:30pm

CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing)
123 4th Ave, 2nd FL
New York, NY  10003
212.677.8621
info@crsny.org
$10 suggested donation

A Framework For New Habits (2010) Click this Image to view video

We had a great evening of multiplicity and duplication at Jillian Peña’s Kinetic Cinema Screening. Citing a background in competitive dance, Jillian described a desire to form a corps or chorus of herself. In her screening, The Double, we screened and discussed works that have inspired her, and that treat multiplicity in a variety of forms. I’d like to highlight one of the filmmakers, Josh Mannis, for our Weekly Webdance and ask the question – What does this duplicity achieve? Heinrich von Kleist described grace and self-consciousness in human movement  as being mutually exclusive, unless the dancer is all-powerful.

Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god. (On the Marionette Theater as translated by Idris Parry).

Where do these shorts stand on that spectrum? What does duplication reveal or obscure?

A Framework for New Habits (2010) is available for view on joshmannis.com

Eko & Sen Hea: A Journey Beyond

The 2010 Kinetic Cinema series kicks off with a night of dance on film curated by renowned filmmaker Carmella Vasser-Johnson.    

Wednesday, February 24 @ 7:00pm · FREE   

Institute of Contemporary Art · University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289 · 215.898.5911   

Victoria Marks & Deborah May: Mother's and Daughters

Kinetic Cinema  

is a New York based screening series that explores the intersection of dance and the moving image.  Organizer Anna Brady Nuse invites a special guest from the dance and film communities to share the films and videos that have inspired and influenced their own work.       

Note on Program from Carmella Vasser-Johnson:     

When I was first approached about sharing a program of dance films that influence and inspire the work that I produce, I was immediately reminded of a pivotal point in my career: in 1999 I joined a group of dance-media makers from across the country and Canada for a fellowship program mentored by a prestigious group of leaders in the field. Over the course of many months I worked with pioneers of dance film like Jac Venza, Merrill Brockway and Girish Bargava (of Dance in America) and with the talented and culturally diverse dancers of the UCLA community. I was enriched by the beauty of California’s ocean and mountains. My cup runneth over. I had only recently changed hats from being a dancer myself to working on the other side of the lens as a videographer/editor/producer. Through this program, I was immersed in a milieu that allowed me to see work from my colleagues and other artists from around the world, stretching my perspective on how to capture dance in two dimensions. I could not get enough of watching and dialoguing with other creators on how they approach their work.  

The films that I share with you in this program represent images, ideas and relationships from that time that remain vital for me today. My work now, as at the beginning, takes an archival or preservational approach. But I also long to see dance in everyday spaces, done by all kinds of people. Some of the selections here satisfy that wish as well.    

Photo: "Dancing Camera Girl" by Flickr user geishaboy500, used under Creative Commons License.

Attend the ‘Dance with Camera’ Exhibition before Kinetic Cinema at The Institute of Contemporary Art.

An exhibition and a screening program that explores a crossover between artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features art works in film, video, and still photography that exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space. Screenings elaborate the show’s theme with iconic dance films, ranging from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films.  

The exhibition’s curator, Jenelle Porter, offers more than a century of filmed dance and dancing film, from the Lumière Brothers in 1896 to Flora Wiegmann dancing beside an LA freeway in 2007.  

Carmella’s Bio: 

Carmella Vassor-Johnsons’ connection to dance began as a performer having been a member of the Philadelphia Dance Company, Civic Ballet Company and Anne-Marie Mulgrew & Dancers Co.. Through her video production company Wild Child Productions, Carmella lends her sensitivity and knowledge of the craft to the arts community through the documentation of dance and the integration of media in stage works. Ms. Vassor-Johnson was awarded a Pew Fellowship for the National Dance/Media Project at the University of California (Los Angeles) and began her relationship with Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2000 as resident videographer and editor. She has produced four educational documentaries for this prestigious organization. She co-directed, with Marlene Millar and Philip Szporer, the documentaries Eko & Sen Hea: A Journey Beyond, World Tea Party, part of the feature-length World Festival of Sacred Music for PBS-Los Angeles, Creating Across Cultures, commissioned by the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance, and Standing at the Edge, We Dance for WYBE-PBS Philadelphia. Her other credits include the experimental video, Endangered Species, an adaptation of the stage work created and performed by hip hop pioneer Rennie Harris, and Quasi Normal, which follows choreographer Susanna Linke as she creates a new work for Jeanne Ruddy Dance. Her documentaries and experimental work have been broadcast on public television and have screened throughout the country including at the Festival of Independents (Philadelphia) and Dance and Camera Festival (New York).