Barbara Sternberg
Nascimento : 1945-03-24, Toronto, Canada
História
Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Ontario Cinematheque, Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries including the University of Guelph, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Dunlop Art Gallery, as well as the Universite d'Avignon, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life- questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video.
Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists' film and video exhibition group. She wrote a handbook and conducted workshops on Media Literacy for high school teachers. She recently organized the "Association for Film Art" (AFFA) to actively support and promote awareness and appreciation of film art. While living in the Maritimes, Sternberg co-founded Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Sternberg wrote a column, "On (experimental) Film" for several years for Cinema Canada, and has written essays on artists and on filmmakers. As well, she has written on the status of film art in galleries and museums—an issue on which she has conducted symposia and lobbied vigorously.
Director
touch (ing), -(ed): Feel, move, affect, be in contact, tangent to, in relation; injure slightly; slightly crazy "My window tonight casts light out onto the snow, I cast from my eye a glance, a touchless touch.. Jorie Graham, "To 2040" We look. we touch, we make connections sometimes, and sometimes we proceed by groping blindly forward.
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The day as it went along – feeling the light of the present…what else is there?
Director
Anything is Everything is composed of sequences of disparate footage, but with threads to follow: circular shapes from outer and terrestrial space; animals and humans; words and ideas. Stuttering, flickering, blinks and blanks set bits of time and space next to each other - seeing connections from the traces. As with most of Sternberg’s films, Anything is Everything considers the questions: what is life, how do we perceive it, how as humans are we a part of the world?
Writer
There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose almost-not-there paintings dovetail with the space I find myself in at this stage of life: at the frontier between youth and old age, not all-is-still-to-come but not all-is-over yet either; and the spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr, particularly her later swirling treetops and skies.
Producer
There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose almost-not-there paintings dovetail with the space I find myself in at this stage of life: at the frontier between youth and old age, not all-is-still-to-come but not all-is-over yet either; and the spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr, particularly her later swirling treetops and skies.
Director
There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose almost-not-there paintings dovetail with the space I find myself in at this stage of life: at the frontier between youth and old age, not all-is-still-to-come but not all-is-over yet either; and the spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr, particularly her later swirling treetops and skies.
Director
Videoed off projected super 8 footage, this short film in four parts (titles from Artaud: “ the earth in the sea, the air in the earth, the fire in the water, the water in the air”) is suggestive of, on some level, the interrelatedness of everything. Porous, fleshy, granular atoms of existence, mutable unending energy, pulsing, beating, burning, blurring, clarifying, obscuring, revealing - fleeting.
Director
Ideas about how we live in the world as humans, the difficulties faced, the conditions of our brief existence, accompany us consciously or unconsciously, overtly or subliminally as we go about our daily lives. The video quotes images from art and film and texts from various philosophies to conjure the fraught and beautiful condition of being alive.
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Brief moments of being, fleeting bits of the surrounding chaos.
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Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating – emotions which conflict, confuse, are difficult to reconcile. The texts ‘speak’ unsaid and unsayable thoughts, impolitic or just impolite. Suppressed exclamations from past injustices, hurts, angers surface, interrupting, erupting, demanding attention.
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Constructed with repetitions and variations, in reference to the musical form of a Nocturne, “Far From” is an accumulation of layers, a density of living, the noise of existence. Ghosts of lives lived and traces of lives being lived, rising.
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Goethe’s colour theory dealt with the optics of colour relations; Rudolf Steiner’s and Kandinsky’s theories attribute emotional, musical, and spiritual affects to colour; North American Natives see personality traits and states of mind, seasons, races, and the four directions in the four colours: red, yellow, white, black. What’s in a name, what’s in a word? A world of colour.
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The central image of in the nature of things is the Forest- sometimes fearful, sometimes a refuge, always mysterious, and the multiple associations and myths embedded in it- myths within which we live and which live within us- our collective history. But, unexpected moments, intensified fragments, catch us unawares- the present confronts us.
Director
vers(ing) opens in a coffee shop. People, sit, enter and exit. A conversation is heard. The video continues, traveling through the streets of a city, to a park, to other coffee shops, other places. No particular destination is reached, but as we travel, fragments of text are read, conversations are heard, settings, people and objects are noticed. vers(ing) presents a moving toward that is transitory and offers a poetic contemplation of how life, meaning, and film are intertwined and constructed.
Director
A short video documentary by Barbara Sternberg, approximating the dual-screen approach of the titular filmmaker. Brown speaks candidly, is shown in a studio; An excerpt from his film Memory Fade (2009) follows the footage. One of many of Sternberg's interviews with fellow artists.
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Images flutter and flicker in orgasmic rhythms. Visual references to Bataille’s “solar anus”, to romantic coupling, to monkeys and man are held together within the sustaining dichotomy of beginnings and endings.
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After Nature, after the Fall, after all - where do we go from here? Digital imagery and optically printed superimpositions combine in a cascading plunge to no(w)here – new beginnings or more of the same?
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Brief moments of being, fleeting bits out of the surrounding chaos. These 4 shorts films can be shown separately or one after the other on the roll.
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"Poetry, film, light, life. An excerpt from Rilke's Ninth Elegy [...] evokes the beauty and brevity of life. Images shimmer in an uncanny light. We catch glimpses only."
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Where does 'I' leave off and the 'world' begin; when does 'past' end and 'present' begin? Images blurring boundaries suggest the relatedness of being. A few moments in an English garden thinking of Virginia Woolf.
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Emotions come & go; so do people. The world is an awful & awesome place; so is the mind. We hear dark inner thoughts of a person & see people taking in the first spring sun in a public park in Toronto. As the World Churns...
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Our busy comings and goings, on the move, working at life are pictured, but layers of images and scratched emulsion make viewing through the depths an effort. If we scratch the surface, however... Glimpses of other states suggest we can surface.
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The sensual, with its beauty and possibility of decay, is set beside immutable statues of the Virgin Mary. Images from technological viewing of the body's inner invisibilities — x-ray, MRI, electronic, and tarot—-are juxtaposed with external surfaces — artist's renderings of inscrutable Mary. Skin and blood, paint and plaster hint at inner life.
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"Your life is like a candle burning. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning." (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar)
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"Your life is like a candle burning. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning." (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar)
Editor
"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning). Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.
Director
"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning). Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.
Director
A mini-presentation of consciousness dealing with cosmos. The world in a grain of sand. Connections between life, death, and the world are neither static nor symmetrical but flowing and intuitive. The movement of emulsion through which images are seen is like the mind trying to retrieve and put things together. C’est la vie is a positive muscular little thing
Director
A bedroom (and life) viewed from the horizontal, while wondering whether to join in the race or wake up to the illusion. The soundtrack quotes from Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans on disillusionment.
Director
In midst, Barbara Sternberg has made a lyrical film about attachment, integration, belonging. Many of the familiar elements of Sternberg's work are here: speed, pulsing rhythms, explosions of colour, light and shape, images of nature and the built environment. But the conflicted situations and turmoil of earlier major films like Through and Through and Beating are gone. Instead, midst focuses dramatically on an understanding of the world through art, specifically painting, especially abstraction, here translated into filmic terms. Abstraction becomes the vehicle for taking on complexity, putting it all together in heightened moments of intense vision characteristic of ‘seeing into’ or ‘being at one’ with nature.
Director
A dog and two cats in France living, naturally.
Writer
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.
Director
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.
Director
The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger; and the pressure of history on one’s identity-how do I identify myself as “I”, how as part of a “we”? The film is visual, perceptual; it was made in awe of the world that goes on with and without us and of our personal, human struggles. It is a film about life and death; a film of discrete units of the eternal and a film of living here and now. It was built up frame by frame-a film about power, played in insignificant terms, in the daily, barely noticed gestures, scenes, frames.
Director
This film is about love - relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is personal, though anonymous, or singular. Another voice-over reads parables, which present a context for the possibility of love or spirit in the world at large. The film ends optimistically: a smile slowly spreads on a man's face. Women addressing men in their own voices.
Director
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.
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Transitions is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being in-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.
Director
Opus 40” is about repetition: repetition in working and living, repetition through multiplicity and series, repetition to form pattern and rhythm, repetition in order and in revealing.
