Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: Handmade Experimental Films

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Cinetoon De Nijverheid in Utrecht is delighted to present experimental filmmaker Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, in person, on July 4th. Foster will present a program of handmade personal experimental films including handpainted 16mm films, 8mm personal diary films and détournements from found archival 35mm footage. July 4th, 2019 at Cinetoon De Nijverheid, Utrecht, The Netherlands. 8PM.

Here is a trailer for the show:
https://vimeo.com/340509942

Programme:
- “Film for Barbara Hammer” (2016, 01:26 min)
An abstract film poem for Barbara Hammer and all creative women: a celebration of LGBT+ love and sensuality.

- “No Personal Checks” (2018, 04:53 min)
From a Super 8mm diary film shot long ago when the artist moved to the Midwest from New York City. Hand-baked, re-photographed, hand-processed and re-edited.  “I live here, but this is not my home.”

- “Self Portrait [Détournement]” (2017, 03:35 min)
A queer experiment in Surrealist autoportraiture. A 'found image as self' morphs into multiple selves who walk away from the camera to meet yet more aspects of the self. Use of a 'found' female figure - one who never looks at the camera - disrupts cis hetero-norms of traditional patriarchal self-portraiture.

- “Kitchen Sink Film” (2019, 03:48 min)
A cameraless Fluxus film - made in the kitchen sink. A playful celebration of light, color and abstraction. Hand-processed, hand-painted, hand-scratched, baked, and edited 16mm film leader.

- “Dreaming on Aspect Ratio” (2019, 02:27 min)
A hand-made diary film and experiment in disrupted stereoscopy; an adopted "found" home movie.

- “Kiki’s Film” (2018, 04:18 min)
A dream poem for Kiki de Montparnasse; artist and creative partner of Man Ray. Far more than a “Muse,” Kiki embodies all things Dada. Kiki looks directly at the viewer in this exercise in Objective Chance Surrealism (automatism); a dream occult homage; a look through Kiki's eyes in her imagined "lost film."

- “Fountains for the Baroness” (2018, 02:49 min)
A Punk Dadaist film for Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, also known as "The Baroness." Elsa, the famed bisexual Dada artist, sculptor and poet is celebrated in a détournement of refashioned found footage and sound.

- “Dada Ship” (2018, 04:23 min)
A punk queer Dadaist time travel film. A ship on the oceans of time, born out of a dream. Dada gives Time it's own reflection; it's alterity; it's Other in this anti-narrative non-film made from détourned footage and sound.

- “Séance for Hilma” (2018, 2 min)
A handmade abstract film for the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. An experiment in mystical 'disrupted  tereoscopy' using random intervals and elements devined from 'filmic automatism' (chance edits, random colors, and abstractions): inspired by the Surrealists, guided by the spirit of Hilma af Klint.

- “Run/Fall” (2017, 04:41 min)
An experiment in automatism (“automatic writing” via chance editing) made in the spirit of Surrealism; with my subconscious and Chance as co-authors. A disturbing image of running from a menacing red abstraction; a visual motif perhaps connecting fifties hysteria with the sociopolitical anxieties of the present.

- “Making America Straight & White Again” (2018, 01:08 min)
In this queer punk film from appropriated archival materials, mayhem and distortion reflect the rise of the retrograde; homophobia, transphobia, racism and white supremacism in America in the early 21st Century. A film of resistance.

- “Will Be, Will Be” (2019, 02:49)
A meditation on women and war, and the current war on women. Stereographic images of rephotographed film evoke women’s struggle and defiance in the face of oppression.

- “Sleeping with Sirens” (5 min excerpt) (2018, variable length)
Hundreds of thousands of post-structuralist materialist video paintings; a study in abstraction and framing. Handmade from VHS glitch.

- "Film for Storm de Hirsch" (aka "Women's Time")(2017, 3 mins)
Rephotographed psychedelic painted and scratched images, collaged and abstracted. A handmade film and homage to legendary filmmaker Storm de Hirsch, one of the pioneers of underground experimental cinema in the 1960s, along with other female directors such as Marie Menken, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, Joyce Wieland, Shirley Clarke, Barbara Rubin and many others. De Hirsch was a poet who moved easily from written poetry to experimental film poetry.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an artist, composer and experimental filmmaker whose films have played all over the world. Originally from New York city, Foster is Willa Cather Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Nebraska, and the creator of "The Woman Who Made the Movies" (1992) a documentary on early women filmmakers, distributed by Women Make Movies. Gwendolyn Audreyt Foster is also author of many volumes in film and cultural studies, including "A Short History of Film" (2018), and "Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader" (2002); (both co-authored by Wheeler Winston Dixon) and many other volumes, such as "Women Film Directors" (1995); "Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora" (1997); "Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman" (2003); and "Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film" (2016). Foster and Dixon are Series Editors of the "Quick Takes" series on movies and popular culture, published by Rutgers University Press.

For more on Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, visit
https://vimeopro.com/gwendolynaudreyfoster/experimental-films and
http://www.gwendolynaudreyfoster.com

Venue: 

De Nijverheid - Utrecht, Netherlands

Dates: 

Thursday, July 4, 2019 - 20:00 to Friday, July 5, 2019 - 19:55

Category: 

Dates: 

Thursday, July 4, 2019 - 20:00 to Friday, July 5, 2019 - 19:55

Venue: 

  • Nijverheidskade 15
    3534 AZ   Utrecht
    Netherlands
    52° 6' 1.7388" N, 5° 4' 58.3536" E