Quote:
The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a library who reads only what others have left behind. The filmed images are predominantly houses: houses seen in passing, along the horizontal; houses reflecting sky and trees in their windows; houses partially hidden by trees or the shadows they cast; houses and office towers simultaneously pictured in stages of demolition and construction.

The images dissolve in and out of the flickering light and dark (sunlight and shadow and the emulsion of the film itself). The site of the self is home. A house is a construct and, per Heidegger, language is the house of being. “Suddenly you are here, at home, and the reality is revealed. The reality was always there, you were not there, at home, and the reality is revealed. The reality was always there, you were not there. It is not the truth which has to be sought, it is you who have to be brought home” (Rajneesh).

TendingToward_1989.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	32 min 25 s
Size: 	531 MiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	640x480 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 968 kb/s
BPP: 	0.214
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AAC @ 318 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/FE91603BBF0DD30/TendingToward_1989.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Barbara Sternberg – Tending Towards the Horizontal (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“Beating” — to get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts… Under this central trope of ‘beating’, with its combined negative and positive implications, the film brings together the individual personally lived and the communal, historic perspective; hatred and forgiveness; laughing and crying. Also brought in relation: the politics of gender and the holocaust; the Old World and North America. Passages of emotion – our lives as we experience them today – move through a terrain of memory and anlaysis.

Beating exists in the area of boundaries. I work with images as they can be registered between abstraction and representation, between blurred and defined, between the formless and the formed in-between, in motion. I try to render images suggestively, bodily and to use vocalizations and words for texture as well as information. “Water, like fire, is a dimension of the carnival insisting on the stateless and the flux… a world in which hierarchies were collapsing, boundaries dissolving… a state of becoming, not of being.” (Robert Kroetsch) The film’s surface, scratched and mottled, negative and positive, black & white and colour bears witness to storms of emotion. From section to section, repetitions occur, connections are made—reminiscences, equivalences between different images—to achieve the feeling or recognition that everything is related. It is all there all the time. (B.ST)

“With Beating, Sternberg’s work moves into new territory as she focuses on the tactile nature of film (through bleaching, scratching, bipacking and re-filming), as well as taking on a much more haunting vision. Body parts, statues, birds in flight and sepia-toned images of Jews in prison camps take on an astounding and breathtaking rhythm. In Sternberg’s words “Beating considers horror/fascination, evil/good, dark/light, and the relation between these terms, the one the flip side of the other… Beating looks at and listens to the parts of ourselves (myself) hidden in the shadow.” A jarring and potent soundtrack blends silence with natural human sounds (groans, sighs, yells) and history’s voices. Beating stands as one of Sternberg’s finest films to date and a testament to her constant re-examination of the self and its relationship to the history it is caught in.” (Alex MacKenzie, Blinding Light Cinema)

“This supremely lyrical ‘beating’ makes some brutal connections.” (Peter Goddard, Toronto Star)

1.04GB | 1h 04mn | 640×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/00C4F80AFF8B7F5/Beating_1995_Sternberg.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Barbara Sternberg – Beating (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Transitions” is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being between – between falling asleep and being awake, between here and there, between being and non-being. These metaphysical themes are evoked by the central image of a woman in white over which layers of images and sound (voices) are superimposed.

https://nitro.download/view/172167D35C8ECBC/Transitions_(1982).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Barbara Sternberg – Transitions (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.