Balagan Film Series and Mass College of Art Film Society Present:The Films of Nancy Andrews (in person)
Program:
"On A Phantom Limb" (2009) 35 mins
"The Haunted Camera" (2006) 31 minutes
On A Phantom Limb (2009, 35 mins)
“The monster did not choose this for her self, to be an amalgam for alchemy.”
This short, avant-garde film features a cyborg heroine who is a metaphor for the postmodern condition--fragmented, reconstructed, hybrid, virtual, part history/part future. The film narrative blends archival documentary footage, animation, and original 16mm live-action footage with a rich musical score and sound collage to tell the story of a woman/bird creature. “On a Phantom Limb”sometimes whimsically and sometimes disturbingly conveys the human encounter with mortality.
The Haunted Camera (16mm film, B&W, 30 minutes, 2006, written, directed, cinematography, editing, puppets and animation by Nancy Andrews, music by John Cooper) This is the final installment in the Ima Plume trilogy. An homage to film noir, it explores Ima Plume’s investigation of her own death. Ima, Public Illustrator, grapples with trying to express things that might not be seen or drawn including: spirits, electronic voice phenomena and studies of animal locomotion. The film combines chalk and drawn animation, puppetry and live action. It is both fiction and documentary. Inspiration for the content and style is taken from pioneers of film, vaudeville, photography and spiritualism.
Bio
Nancy Evelyn Andrews lives in Seal Harbor, Maine, where she makes films and music. Her work explores questions like: What is our place in the universe? What do we really know? How do we try to grasp the past, or the future? How can humans interface with the natural world at this juncture in history? She works in a hybrid form combining storytelling, documentary, puppetry, animation, and vaudeville. Her characters and stories are synthesized from various sources, including history and autobiographical material. Her work has been presented by the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Jerusalem Film Festival, Flaherty Seminar,Nova, Cinema Bioscoop, Brussels, Belgium, and Taiwan International Animation Festival, among others; and is in the film collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, LEF New England Moving Image Fund, Illinois State Arts Council, The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (supported by the Jerome Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts), and National Endowment for the Arts. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Master of Fine Arts in 1995, and her undergraduate studeis were at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, BFA, 1983.
Nancy is currently on faculty at the College of the Atlantic where she teaches performance art, video making and film history.
