Erotics of Attention: Films of Ellie Epp
Saturday, February 12, 19:30h
CinemaSpace @ Segal Centre for the Performing Arts
5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine, Montréal, Québec

CinemaSpace is very excited to present four 16mm films by filmmaker/writer/philosopher Ellie Epp in our new series Parallax views. Alongside her films, she will introduce Pictures On Pink Paper, a film by British artist Lis Rhodes. There will be a Q&A after the screening with Ellie Epp.

Ellie Epp was born is La Grace, Alberta, in 1945. After graduating with a B.A. from Queen’s University in Kingston, she went on to study film at the Slade School of Art in London, U.K., where she frequented the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and met avant-garde filmmakers such as Sally Potter, Annabel Nicolson and Lis Rhodes in the early 1970s. While in London she began working on her seminal film Trapline, which she completed in 1976 after returning to Canada. In Vancouver, Epp was instrumental in the founding of the Women’s Interart Co-op in 1975. Epp holds an MA in Philosophy and an interdisciplinary Ph.D from Simon Fraser University specializing in embodied epistemology. Ellie Epp currently lives in San Diego, California, and teaches in the individualized MA program at Goddard College in Vermont.

"I have always shot on reversal. It comes from shooting color slides, which I have liked for the discipline. Framing of a slide is absolute. You can't fix it later. You only have once chance. People have said they can see in my work that I'm coming from still photography. I can see that too, but I think the fixed frame is appropriate to the kind of film I make, that sense of someone standing and staring. The fixed frame says that I've given the stage to the thing I'm looking at, I'm letting it take me. It is a kind of erotic. I think my films are erotic. Or maybe my sense of erotic, which is that kind of complete attention, entranced attention, to nuances of contact and motion. My films when I am able to see them are total pleasure. They're light-fucks. David Rimmer talks about the erotic quality of the film image and the way people often can't stand it to be that, basically can't stand to be fucked in so tender a way. They keep themselves busy having theoretical thoughts about the work. There is theory to be found about this work, but not that kind of theory. I'd like to know more about the body's relation to a film. That's like wanting to know more about the feel I have for a framing, or why color has to be just right or else. A film is so vulnerable to print quality, for instance. Seeing a bad print is appalling. We all know about that but we don't know why." (Ellie Epp, from As If an Interview)