Director
Footage from the vault of Chicago Film Archives is repurposed by Jean Sousa and Kioto Aoki.
Director
The Losing Battle is part of an octet of film poems inspired by my late Aunt Alice’s poetry. In this poem she uses the metaphor of war for a lover’s quarrel. My intention with the film is to amplify the emotional tone of the words, through repetition and staccato editing of image and sound in an attempt to convey the physical discomfort of being in an argument without winners, only losers. The source material for the image is an outdoor performance of the Quebec Circus, a comment on the overly dramatic lyrics of the poem, with the final smoke-filled image referencing a battlefield.
Director
Today is Sunday is both a still life and a landscape film in which the characters are described by nature. The clouds, the wind, the waves, articulate their presence. A dialogue is established between the external environment, the sound, the weather, and the internal musings of the female character.
Director
An abstract narrative shot from the point of view of a house - the woman is seen from an angle of the wall, the corner observes her. This is a film about fleeting sensations in the midst of ordinary activities, the energy of heat, and the activity of the imagination.
Director
This film deals with the physical properties of the film medium, and pushing those distinctive features to their limit. The subject of the film is motion, and it is an attempt to get inside of it. It was made with a moving subject and a moving camera with an open shutter, the result being that each frame is unique, without the smooth continuity that is expected in film. The subject, a female body at close range, provides an intimacy and eroticism. At the same time it can be seen as a modern version of Futurist simultaneity.
Director
A film by Jean Sousa.
Director
A playing with words, narrative, and performance…..A display of my fantasies, fears, and mundane realities……A narcissistic reflection and indulgence in my ecstasies, torments, and humorous nuances….A personal journey through the question ‘What am I Doing Here?’ and the endless attempts to answer it. Jean Sousa
Director
Ellen on the Rope is an energetically expressive study of performer Ellen Fisher working out on the rope in her Lodge Hall rehearsal space, itself a handsome room of classical proportions and lighting. Sousa’s film studies Fisher’s strenuous activity from a series of vantage points, creating a strobing rhythm by crossing the camera’s shutter speed with the rate of the rope traversing its frame. Unlike other athletic film studies, usually focused on body properties or close-ups of muscular exertion, Ellen on the Rope directs our attention more towards physics, tracing the dynamics and energy of Ellen’s patterns through space with a camera that progresses from tripod stillness to sympathetic motion. A simple exercise, this film offers a fine example of two artists working out together on rope and celluloid.” B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader, 1979
Director
Summer Medley uses realistic footage to create an organic pattern of bold colors, horizontal movements, and simplified forms. Inspired by Steve Reich's tape loops, the film is constructed from four out-of-sync film loops that combine and recombine to form variations of changing images. An 8mm collection of footage from a summer vacation in positive and negative color, is layered with a hi-contrast pairs of legs dancing to the music of Hamza El Din "Song With Tar," creating a puzzle where shapes add, subtract, and multiply in a medley of color-motion-form in time.
Director
"...Sousa begins with the footage of performers in the midst of their activities. She then alters the choreography (via optical printing and extensive processing) into a slower, sometimes nearly still, dance of colors and shapes freed of lifelike requirements. Her concern with physicality divides its targets equally between the performing bodies and the film within which they are activated. The Circus flattens the flamboyant action into graphic details, dissolving those details further into mere traces, striations of color, and the pure movement of film grain." B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader, 1979
