Monday, April 30, 2018

4/18/18 Marjorie Keller

Program:


Misconception (1977, dir. Marjorie Keller 43 min.)
"MISCONCEPTION is a film structured on juxtapositions: indoors/outdoors; redecoration/destruction; exercises/actual birth; male opinion/female opinion; preparation/pain. Its montage structure of both image and sound balances MISCONCEPTION on the precarious moment, like birth, between these counterposed positions: conception/misconception, point/counterpoint." – Anne Friedberg "MISCONCEPTION is composed of six parts that together chronicle the experience of one woman and her husband during the course of her natural childbirth. The film communicates the precision and care with which it has been assembled. (The) structure lends the film a pacing rhythm that has less to do with traditional cinema-verit & eacute; documentary or film journalism than with the pacing and rhythm of poetry." – B. Ruby Rich


Herein (1991, dir. Marjorie Keller 35 min.)
"If you put it on tape, you can't erase it." HEREIN charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman's autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side in New York, street prostitution and drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space and history.


IS AS IS (1991, dir. Saul Levine, 3.5 min.)
A portrait of a mother with her arms full in the backyard bathing her twin babies as the early spring light sings and dances. Later the father cooks a fish. Marjorie Keller is the mother.


Total Run Time: 82 Minutes


Bio: Marjorie Keller (1950–1994) was an experimental filmmaker, author, activist, film scholar. J. Hoberman called her "an unselfish champion of the avant-garde.”