Light Industry: Two Films by Marjorie Keller
Tuesday, March 19 2013, 19:30h
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, New York 11222

Writing in Artforum in 1981, Amy Taubin praised Marjorie Keller as “perhaps the only major filmmaker that the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.” At the time of her sudden death in 1994 at age 43, she would leave behind twenty-seven 8mm and 16mm films; tonight, Light Industry presents two of her most important works, Misconception and Daughters of Chaos. Built from small-gauge diary footage, both films are at once lyrical and anti-romantic, meditations on female experience that render their subjects through radically nonlinear editing and complex experiments in sound-image correspondence. Like Stan Brakhage, one of Keller's great influences, she transforms her subject matter—a birth, a wedding—from the stuff of home movies to an adventure in perception. Yet she forgoes the self-mythologizing of her predecessor, offering a more earthbound, though no less poetic, take on the subjective nature of memory.

Keller also produced a substantial body of writings, including a book on the role of childhood in the work of Brakhage, Jean Cocteau, and Joseph Cornell, as well as notes towards a proposed study of women’s experimental cinema that would have charted a trajectory from pioneers like Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and Carolee Schneemann through to a younger generation represented by Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich, and Leslie Thornton, among others. In addition to her achievements as an artist and critic, Keller played a crucial role in the Collective for Living Cinema, serving on its board of directors and editing the Collective’s publications Idiolects and Motion Picture. She engaged in the evolving debates around feminism, film, and the avant-garde that ran from the 70s through the 90s, vigorously defending a tradition of highly personal, formally rigorous work that some had rejected as irredeemably masculinist, while at the same time subjecting that tradition to a nuanced critique through her own scholarship and filmmaking. Though highly skeptical of the ways in which feminist film studies had, ironically, come to ignore some of the considerable accomplishments by women in the American avant-garde, Keller was nevertheless one of the key figures of her era to synthesize theory and practice at the most advanced level.