A Mirror Avant-Garde: Non-canonical Canonicals by Women from Film-Makers’ Coop

Saturday, October 17, 8 PM @ CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave.

Part of Fall 2015


If you’ve seen more than three of the films in this program, I’d be surprised. Yet every single one of these films by women filmmakers, chosen from the collection of the Filmmaker’s Coop, deserves to be written about, taught in classes, and be part of the canon of avant-garde film.

In a program of striking artistic voices from filmmakers with large bodies of work, you’ll see resonances with the films of Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, Stan Brakhage, Len Lye, Owen Land, Hollis Frampton, Barbara Rubin, Malcolm LeGrice, and many others.

An important thematic thread running through this program is artists’ incorporation of various kinds of mirrors, both material and metaphoric. Mirrors reverse, distort, and reflect ourselves and our culture back to us in unexpected ways – and have been crucial to thinking about how we look and how we’re looked at.
Curated by Tess Takahashi

Programme:

Baby Doll (Tessa Hughes-Freeland, 1982) 16mm, b/w, 5m

Mutiny (Abby Child, 1982) 16mm, color, 10 m

Noyes (Bette Gordon, 1976) 16mm, b/w, 4m

Abstraction (Rosalind Schneider, 1971) 8mm blown up to16mm, color, 8m

All Women Are Equal
(Marguerite Paris, 1972) 16mm, b/w, 15m

The Scary Movie (Peggy Ahwesh, 1996) 9m

What is a man? (Sara-Kathryn Arledge, 1958) 16mm, b/w + color, 10m

Baby Doll, Tessa Hughes-Freeland