Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Regards

    The film confronts our modes of composing and communicating information by continuously asking “What is it?” and providing a range of possible interpretations of the phenomena it depicts.The three characters who appear in the film are female and it is through them, in large part, that the film’s ideas are communicated. This indicates a “female voice” but leaves open the question of an exclusively female point of view or mode of preception.

  • Roses Are Blue

    “Roses Are Blue” is a short dramatic film exploring a woman’s sensual awakening to spiritual and feminist transformation. A blend of sci-fi, mysticism and modern relationship angst, “Roses Are Blue” was broadcast on WTN (Women’s Television Network) and won 2nd Prize at the 1998 Glebe Scenefest in Sydney, Australia. It features music by David Logan, Chip Yarwood and Edie Steiner.

  • RSVP

    “RSVP” is a lyrical piece which explores the emotions felt by a group of people, some who knew, and some who did not know, a man who has just died. Its approach, however, is unusual: there is almost no dialogue, but rather a central piece of music – “Le Spectre de la Rose” from Berlioz’ Les Nuits d’Eté, performed by Jessye Norman. This piece was requested by the man several weeks before his death; it plays on the radio, ironically, as his lover, Sid, returns home from the funeral. The music forms a link between various people listening to it…

  • Rue des Teinturiers

    Filmed frame-by-frame in the camera, the focus of each frame is adjusted so that certain graphic features of items in the street are extracted and inscribed onto the film strip in a way which allows their characteristics to be seen, when projected in succession on the screen, as parts of a spatiotemporal image stretching from a position on a balcony over a canalized river to the road. The film is composed of twelve 2 3/4 minute reels, each of which was filmed on a different day throughout a six-month period. No editing was undertaken other than joining the reels together.…

  • Rules of the Road

    “Rules of the Road” tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the primary objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling along the sides. A typical American family car for an atypical American family, it provides them at first with all the familiar comforts. But when their relationship ends, the car becomes the property of one woman and the bane of the other’s existence. Even long after their separation, this tangible reminder of their life together – and thousands of its imitators- continues to prowl the streets of…

  • Barbara’s Blindness

    “There is no one named Barbara to be found; a pair of mysterious blind-person’s hands (looking suspiciously like Wieland’s) make only one cameo appearance to ‘read’ us the title; yet these seemingly incongruous elements provide the perfect introduction to the ironic humour of the film itself. The main source of the film seems to be an old grade-school morality-movie on the appreciation of eyesight, starring golden-haired Mary, who finds herself temporarily blind, and a leaden-voiced narrator, who finds himself our unwitting straight-man. The filmmakers re-edited this curiosity and intercut it with other stock footage of disasters, agricultural techniques, and monster…

  • Sailboat

    “‘Sailboat’ has the simplicity of a child’s drawing. A toy-like image of a sailboat sails without interruption on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seems to underline the image to the point of exaggeration, somewhat in the way a child might draw a picture of water and write word sounds on it to make it as emphatic as possible. The little image is interrupted at one point by a huge shoulder appearing briefly in the left-hand corner.” – Robert Cowan, Take One “This little Sailboat film will sail right through your gate and into your heart.” –…

  • Sally’s Beauty Spot

    In this lively, intimate film, a large black mole above an Asian woman’s breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and sexual difference. Off-screen women’s voices and scenes form the 1960 Hollywood miscegenation melodrama “The World of Suzie Wong” counterpoint Sally’s own interracial encounters and emerging self-awareness. A stylish and playfully impressionistic account of racial expectations and role-playing which critiques Western stereotypes of Asian femininity. “…challenges fetishistic and colonialist forms of representation, wittily tracing a character’s move from stereotypical object to sexual subject.” – Laura U. Marks, Afterimage “Framed as a struggle with identity and racialized notions of beauty, this…

  • Sammy

    Sammy was a dog I had when growing up in Dundas, Ontario. I found old Super 8 footage of Sammy long after he had passed away, and I decided to work with these images on both a rotoscope and optical printer, to playfully and rhythmically evoke my emotions, memories, and image of little Sammy.

  • Sanctus

    “Sanctus” is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson (‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ 1929) and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as its protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate. “In ‘Sanctus,’ Barbara Hammer addresses in a visually and aurally stunning fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the raw material onto which she cretes images. She has transformed ‘found footage’ – scientific x-ray films from the 1950s – into a lyrical journey, into…