Kathryn Ramey

History

Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing and various direct animation techniques. Her scholarly interest is focused on the social history of the avant-garde film community, the anthropology of visual communication and the intersection between avant-garde and ethnographic film and art practices. Her films have screened at festivals and other venues including the Toronto Film Festival, the TriBeCa film festival, 25fps Experimental Film Festival, Jihlava Documentary Film Festival, Alchemy Film Festival, Cinepoesia/Bogota Experimental Film Festival and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.

Movies

LIMEN

Director

LIMEN - threshold. between two states of being. the boundary of perception.

ENOLAEMEVAEL/LEAVEMEALONE

Director

An unfaithful remake of Man Ray’s 1926 “Emak Bakia” made without the use of a motion picture camera, ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE is a nonsensical response to brutality alongside a celebration of silver process. The film uses a variety unconventional image making and hand-printing strategies to achieve its hi-contrast jittery style including contact printing with a mag-light taped to a sync block and hand-processing in a bucket. No conventional motion picture processes/tools/labs were used. The film is meant to be played/looped at 24fps with the soundtrack provided by the image.

Yanqui Walker and the Optical Revolution

Director

This film explores a now-obscure American expansionist, William Walker, who through military force and coercion became president of Nicaragua in 1856. Walker was one of many expansionists who believed it was America's Manifest Destiny to conquer all of the Americas and who engaged in border raids in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Filmmaker Kathryn Ramey blends found footage, documentary photography, ethnographic inquiry, and personal travelogue with experimental film techniques such as hand-processing, optical printing, and time-lapse to detour and derail the various approaches to historymaking that have been applied to this story.

Panic Bodies

"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

SAYOR

Director

An acronym for swimming at your own risk, SAYOR refers to a forum without a moderator. Three years in the lives of three AMAB (assigned male at birth) children with a parent/observer. What does it mean to be male in the 21st century?

El Signo Vacío

Director

EL SIGNO VACÍO (the empty sign) is a feature length cinematic essay interrogating the 120-year US occupation of Puerto Rico and the filmmaker’s bizarre connection to it via her surname, RAMEY, to reveal how US democratic narratives effectively obscure her capitalist/military domination of the islands.