Jennifer Reeves
Birth : 1971-01-01, Sri Lanka
History
Jennifer Reeves (b. 1971, Sri Lanka) is a New York-based filmmaker working primarily on 16mm film. Reeves was named one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” in the film journal Cinema Scope in the spring of 2012. Reeves has made experimental films since 1990. She does her own writing, cinematography, editing, and sound design. Her subjective and personal films push the boundaries of film through optical-printing and direct-on-film techniques. Reeves has consistently explored themes of memory, mental health and recovery, feminism and sexuality, landscape, wildlife, and politics from many different angles. Reeves has also made a number of experimental narratives, most notably her highly acclaimed feature THE TIME WE KILLED. The Village Voice Film Critic’s poll (2005) honored THE TIME WE KILLED with votes from six film critics for categories including: Best Film, Best Cinematography, and Best Performance.
Director
A diagnosis of an eye disorder incited this meditation on fear and beauty. Glimpses of curious and creative souls peek out of countless hand-painted film frames. Infinite colors and textures burst, blend and challenge the primacy of uniform vision.
Director
A two-year-old boy revels in all things tiny and huge on and around a farm. His father nurtures his exuberant and insatiable curiosity of new experiences– from climbing a crumbling wall to discovering the natural world. As a father-son bond grows, the mother with camera observes, gets lost into a solitary landscape and returns. The fleeting and glowing visual field evokes the delicate tension between distance and intimacy. Richly toned black and white positive, negative and solarized images, combined with snippets of voice, suggest the texture of memory. Reeves shot, hand-processed, solarized and colored Strawberries in the Summertime in rural Ontario at the “Film Farm” Independent Imaging Retreat run by filmmaker Philip Hoffman.
Director
Anything but gray, a color explosion sparkles, bubbles, and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this exuberant, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. But it speaks of the end of one era or another, a time for letting go and celebration. Control triumphs over disorder. Reeves mixed samples from rusty, dusty old machines, records, and electric waves to create an aural passage through technological progress.
Director
Exhumed motion-pictures from my very own Elkhart, Indiana landfill constitute the canvas of this obsessively hand-painted film. This is my anti-landfill film, an attempt to transform 16mm out-takes into a meditation on nature's losing battle to decompose our relics of abandoned technologies and productions. Primal screams from the wilderness rise until they are buried in silence.
Director
Passing landscapes, sound transmissions, trips to the seashore and portraits of a grandmother that all strike the viewer as an elusive and intensely lyrical panorama of the past.
Director
The film rejoices the splendor of nature as the camera eye traverses land and sea in a montage of diverse ecosystems from the Americas to Iceland and New Zealand. Colorful organic textures and forms, inspired by qualities of the natural world, were created through an array of direct-on-film techniques. This abstract imagery is superimposed upon nature cinematography through double-projection, creating depth and merging the powerful intricacies of the natural world with an artist’s reverence for it all. Anxiety and loss are evoked as the camera hurries to “capture” the natural world on film before it vanishes.
Director
Found images from twentieth-century educational films are sewn together with melted-down pharmaceuticals fixed to the film in a concentrated fusion with pulsating music.
Director
Film artist Jennifer Reeves and musician Anthony Burr collaborated to make this live film and music performance, which mixes and subverts symbols of science, industry, medicine and madness. Up to 4 screens and 4 channels of multi-layered music immerse the audience in colorful rhythmic molecular forms, morphing frequencies and visual textures, which are broken down to the particle. Found images from the 20th century educational films are sewn together with melted down pharmaceuticals affixed directly to the film, and form a concentrated fusion with pulsating electronic sounds and an acoustic multi-tonal bass clarinet. Illustrations of brain dendrites, synapses, waveforms and assembly lines personify the movement of frequencies and light as they envelop the audience. As the performance ensues, the intensity builds to a point of irresistible danger and rupture.
Director
He Walked Away superimposes landscape, portraiture, abstraction, and hand painted film. Much of the film reframes shots and outtakes from Reeves' earlier work (Configuration 20, Fear of Blushing, The Time We Killed).
Director
Shadows Choose Their Horrors is the dark and melodic diary of a necromancer living on the edge between the mortal world and the realm of lost souls. Sinister forces surround Madame G (Winsome Brown) as she tries to bond with her favorite undead. Using magic and ritual to give them new life and pleasures, Madame G is shocked by the devastating outcome. This camp and experimental reworking of early silent horror was inspired by both the un-staged Aaron Copland ballet Grohg, and the film that stirred the young Copland to write his ballet, Nosferatu.
Editor
The Time We Killed portrays the inner life of a writer unable to leave her Brooklyn apartment on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq. Robyn Taylor tries to kick her growing agoraphobia by re-imagining her past and contemplating world events of the present. As Robyn begins to overcome the amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down with “the amnesia of the American people”.
Cinematography
The Time We Killed portrays the inner life of a writer unable to leave her Brooklyn apartment on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq. Robyn Taylor tries to kick her growing agoraphobia by re-imagining her past and contemplating world events of the present. As Robyn begins to overcome the amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down with “the amnesia of the American people”.
Producer
The Time We Killed portrays the inner life of a writer unable to leave her Brooklyn apartment on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq. Robyn Taylor tries to kick her growing agoraphobia by re-imagining her past and contemplating world events of the present. As Robyn begins to overcome the amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down with “the amnesia of the American people”.
Writer
The Time We Killed portrays the inner life of a writer unable to leave her Brooklyn apartment on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq. Robyn Taylor tries to kick her growing agoraphobia by re-imagining her past and contemplating world events of the present. As Robyn begins to overcome the amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down with “the amnesia of the American people”.
Director
The Time We Killed portrays the inner life of a writer unable to leave her Brooklyn apartment on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq. Robyn Taylor tries to kick her growing agoraphobia by re-imagining her past and contemplating world events of the present. As Robyn begins to overcome the amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down with “the amnesia of the American people”.
Director
This photogram film of sweets, sustenance and colored light was originally made for a Stan Brakhage memorial screening at the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in New York. The title refers to an anecdote my father told me about his childhood- at five years of age, these were the words my father used to tell his own father that men had come and turned off their electricity. My father died of cancer shortly before Brakhage did- making this a film was a gesture for the both of them.
Director
Fear of Blushing bursts forth with irrepressible hand-painted color, corroded emulsion and a menacing soundscape of looped voices, distorted instrumentals, samples & rhythm. Fleeting visions and voices erupt out of the ominous abstraction in unusual juxtapositions, suggesting a cinematic free-association marked by anxiety, pleasure and shame. Best appreciated in the immediate; the 7200 painted frames fly by at an average of 12 per second.
Director
"Appropriated audio from motivational tapes and raw hewn video footage of the exploits of two punk girls creating a disturbance in an Ohio Mall (circa 1988) challenge the great society of the American heartland. A savvy examination of hard-edge adolescent aggression and an attack on "proper" codes of behavior. The future is yours." -Karyn Riegel, Occularis film series.
Director
A dark and sensual experimental narrative that explores a skilled technical worker's fantasies during her nights as a femme in the lower east side of New York.
Director
Solarized, tinted, and optically-printed, this is a surreal portrait of desire, ghosts and pursuit of the sensual. Rhythmic color shifts in the emulsion bring life to the rural landscape, which seems to embody the terrain of the subconscious. Three women seek pleasure and the beyond in parallel universes, which never quite intersect. When one finds another, she is either buried in the sand or asleep under a tree. Made at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm, 1997.
Director of Photography
CHRONIC is an experimental narrative about a young woman who began mutilating herself as a girl to cope with a traumatic mid-western childhood. The lush optically-printed scenes take Gretchen’s point of view from her punk youth, a stay in a mental hospital, and her release into the big city. Scripted scenes are inter-spliced with documentary and found footage, illustrating the culture Gretchen lives in, her inner world and relationships from her birth to her final day.
Gretchen
CHRONIC is an experimental narrative about a young woman who began mutilating herself as a girl to cope with a traumatic mid-western childhood. The lush optically-printed scenes take Gretchen’s point of view from her punk youth, a stay in a mental hospital, and her release into the big city. Scripted scenes are inter-spliced with documentary and found footage, illustrating the culture Gretchen lives in, her inner world and relationships from her birth to her final day.
Editor
CHRONIC is an experimental narrative about a young woman who began mutilating herself as a girl to cope with a traumatic mid-western childhood. The lush optically-printed scenes take Gretchen’s point of view from her punk youth, a stay in a mental hospital, and her release into the big city. Scripted scenes are inter-spliced with documentary and found footage, illustrating the culture Gretchen lives in, her inner world and relationships from her birth to her final day.
Director
CHRONIC is an experimental narrative about a young woman who began mutilating herself as a girl to cope with a traumatic mid-western childhood. The lush optically-printed scenes take Gretchen’s point of view from her punk youth, a stay in a mental hospital, and her release into the big city. Scripted scenes are inter-spliced with documentary and found footage, illustrating the culture Gretchen lives in, her inner world and relationships from her birth to her final day.
Director
Exuberant rhythms are created for the eyes in this nostalgic study of the single film frame, by cutting, pasting, and painting clear and photographed 16mm film frames. Fleeting shapes in lush, spattered color flicker and dance to big band beats.
Director
Primordial sounds and organic creatures evoke the moment when life began.
Director
Dirty girls, masturbation, incest, lesbian accusations - sexual biographies mixed up with home-movie-like footage.
Director
Nine visually rhythmic film sketches depict the passions, fetishes and humor of various women characters- from Eve in her garden to an everyday pineapple goddess.
Director
"A fragmented psychic landscape where TV clips, bar talk, and rape loom close. Trying to reconstruct and resolve sexual abuse becomes a complex project of association and recall. Daydream has a thick, luminous feel." Elisabeth Subrin, Visions Magazine
Director
A bloody adaptation of a William Carlos Williams poem. The film begins with Williams’ question “What are these elations I have at my own underwear?” and Reeves answers with a not so elated, transgressive statement.
