Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

Rephotographed psychedelic painted and scratched images, collaged and abstracted. An homage to underground experimental poet and filmmaker, Storm de Hirsch; one of the great unsung women in avant-garde film.

"Dreaming in Aspect Ratio" is a hand-made diary film and experiment in disrupted stereoscopy; an adopted "found" home movie. A playful queer self-portrait in found dream memories. An experimental documentary and Surrealist détournement. Bright colours collaged with black and white imagery of the joy of female friendships evoke dreaming and reverie; a lost queer childhood regained through the magic of cinema, disrupting typical self-portraiture and auto-ethnography.

Mass for Shut-ins. A hand-painted 16mm film. Direct animation. 8 minutes. "A fever dream. An infinitely morphing kaleidscopic stained glass window; bells that remind me of the sounds of Amsterdam, my second home after New York. Frantic REM sleep kicks in around 5 minutes..." A pandemic film made under quarantine, Spring 2020. How do we survive this pandemic? We survive through art & music.

Mass for Shut-ins. A hand-painted 16mm film. Direct animation. 8 minutes. "A fever dream. An infinitely morphing kaleidscopic stained glass window; bells that remind me of the sounds of Amsterdam, my second home after New York. Frantic REM sleep kicks in around 5 minutes..." A pandemic film made under quarantine, Spring 2020. How do we survive this pandemic? We survive through art & music.

To the eerie sound of a vintage record, colour blotches saturate the frame like moving-image stained-glass windows in Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s Kitchen Sink Film, a short 16mm work of painterly psychedelia – handmade in the artist’s own kitchen sink.

A ship on the oceans of time: a Dadaist time travel film. A hand-made split-screen film using the technique of disrupted stereoscopy and collage détournement of found images.

WOMEN WHO MADE THE MOVIES traces the careers and films of directors such as Alice Guy Blaché, arguably the first person to direct a film with a plot in 1896, "La Fée Aux Choux,". Others documented in this film include Ida Lupino, who also had a long career as an actor; Ruth Ann Baldwin, who directed numerous early westerns; Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's film propagandist; as well as Dorothy Davenport Reid, Lois Weber, Kathlyn Williams, Germaine Dulac, Cleo Madison and many other women who made a lasting contribution to film history. WOMEN WHO MADE THE MOVIES features film clips, stills and other archival materials, bringing to life the work of these essential and often neglected filmmakers.