Holly Fisher received a B.A. in Asian Art History at Columbia University in 1964, and a M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University in 1982. She lives and works in Tribeca, New York City.
Fisher has been active since the mid-sixties as an independent filmmaker, printmaker, teacher, and film editor, including Oscar nominated documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?. Her experimental short works and long-form essay films are explorations in time, memory and perception. They have been screened in museums and film festivals worldwide including Whitney Museum Biennials; The Tribeca Film Festival; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Film Forum, Japan; and two world premieres in The Forum of the Berlinale, Germany. She has received multiple grants from The Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, CAPS, and The American Film Institute, among others. Her silent film Rushlight won the Grand Prize in the 1985 Black Maria Film Festival, and her feature Bullets for Breakfast received “Best Experimental Film Award” at the 1992 Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 1995, the Museum of Modern Art, New York presented the solo retrospective The Films of Holly Fisher.
In recent years, Fisher has made works from film and amateur iPhone sources, looped for gallery and storefront installation, as well as for exhibition in conjunction with her ongoing archival digital print projects. Her current work-in-progress, Out of the Blue, is a long-form experimental essay, structured within a series of cloud video studies, filmed with an iPhone on a flight between Berlin and New York. This project will be integrated into Thin/Ice (work-in-progress), which began as a daily filming practice in a small pond behind the refurbished mill where she was living for several years. Both projects will include resonant imagery pulled from Fisher’s video diary, edited within the semi-static imagery of clouds and pond. Thin/Iceintegrates issues of (family) suicide and global warming; it will be Fisher’s first large-scale installation project and is scheduled for completion in late 2020.
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Otherwise Pictures LLC is Holly Fisher’s production company. Formed in 2006, it is an umbrella for multiple productions from then to present. These include long-form personal and collaborative works, personal experimental films and production of digital print series for gallery exhibition.
Titles produced by Otherwise Pictures include: Everywhere at Once (2010); A Question of Sunlight (2014); experimental short videos Trio en Rose (2014), Ruffled Feathers (2016), Goldfish Variations (2012) and t h i n k t a n k (2014); and Ghostdance for a New Century (2015), which premiered at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn with a live performance by the composer and cellist Ha-Yang Kim.
Fisher/Slezas Films Inc. (1965-1971) was a production company formed in 1965 by Holly Fisher and filmmaker Romas V. Slezas. A cinema-verite’ production team formed during the making of their first award-winning film Progress, Pork-Barrel, and Pheasant Feathers, Fisher and Slezas covered all aspects of production, learning as they went along. Slezas did camera, Fisher was sound-recordist, Slezas kept the books, Fisher managed production, interviews, etc. Editing was shared mutually. Other projects included their seminal documentary Watermen (recently restored by Film Restoration), projects for Volkswagen of America, and a pair of documentaries with BF Skinner
Programme:
- Here Today Gone Tomorrow (aka Rushlight) (1984), Super 8 (to 16mm) / color / silent / 54 min
Screening format: HD (premiere of a new digital transfer)
Special thanks to Holly Fisher and Light Cone
