Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof
История
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof is a Toronto-based experimental filmmaker, scholar and Associate Professor at the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University. She is a graduate of Media Arts at Ryerson University (BAA) and Communication and Culture at York University (MA) and (PhD). Her doctoral research concentrated on feminine aesthetics in avant-garde cinema and body art, and drew on Julia Kristeva’s theories on vanguard poetry and Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of ethics. Izabella’s writings on cinema, art, dance, technology and culture, have appeared in Parol, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and in Ultimate Reality and Meaning Journal (Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Philosophy of Understanding), and in anthologies on media arts and on screen dance, including a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Screendance. Izabella’s film and video projects have screened in numerous group programs at international film festivals, cinematheques, galleries and art centres in Canada and abroad. Solo screenings of her works have been presented at the Diagonal Film Archive in Seoul, South Korea (2008), at the 10th Festival des Cinéma Différent de Paris in France (2008), and at Canadian Film Institute: CAFÉ eX in Ottawa (2007). Izabella’s projects received many awards from film festivals, as well as grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, NFB, LIFT, and Ryerson University. Her films are included in collections at several universities and in video anthologies, including: Made by Hand, Contre L’Oeil, and Loop Collective. She is the co-founder and an active member of the successful Toronto-based experimental film collective, the Loop Collective (loopcollective.com). Her work as an artist and scholar is interdisciplinary and often explores connections between art, bodies, and technology.
Director
(Please note that this preview is at one-sixth of the full resolution) [...] As light travels through space over time, its voyage leaves its traces either as starlight we can see in the night sky or as photographic inscriptions (on paper, acetate, or CCD) in our family albums and home movies. Photographic and cinema archives are essentially archives of light, of timeless moments drawn with light. Relics of Lumen draws on the Black Star photography collection, archived at Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, and on NASA’s digital archives. It combines thousands of still and moving images captured over the last century of people in travel (tourists, explorers, immigrants, refugees, and migrant workers), and technologies of transport and communication, while simultaneously reminding us of the persistent human desire for discovery, adventure, travel, and conquest.
Director
A memory trace of a unique moment near Montjuïc in Barcelona rendered palpable.
Director
3:50 (2012)
Director
A visual duet consisting of a 16mm film and a 16mm photogram self-portrait collage. It is inspired by earthly pleasures and wonders as revealed in the vibrant marvels of Stan Brakhage's cinema and in the central panel of the 1504 triptych by Hieronymous Bosch titled “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”
Director
9:19 (2007)
A self-portrait of Pruska-Oldenhof's childhood and native home in three segments of image, song and text. Images of her birth country are shown as she silently mouths a Polish emigrants' song, followed by a recording of her singing the same song as a child, followed by a text translation of the song into English.
Director
A self-portrait of Pruska-Oldenhof's childhood and native home in three segments of image, song and text. Images of her birth country are shown as she silently mouths a Polish emigrants' song, followed by a recording of her singing the same song as a child, followed by a text translation of the song into English.
Director
Edison and Lumiere footage of the Serpentine Dance, created by Loïe Fuller, is reworked to follow the poetic interpretations of several artists who experienced Fuller’s performances in person: texts of Mallarmé, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and a futurist manifesto on dance by Marinetti.
Director
“her carnal longings” is an audiovisual meditation on the human body and the film medium at a time when the futures of both are in question. Using the “emulsion lift” technique on 16mm film, sections of emulsion were lifted off, torn up or smudged, and then re-adhered. In combination with digital video technology, Pruska-Oldenhof creates an intricate analogue-digital weave that explores both the body’s and the film’s surface. The film emulsion wrinkles, rips and dissolves - reminding us that it, like human flesh, is fragile and perishable.
In a dark room holding a flashlight in my hand, I paint with light. Each stroke of light unveils an image and permits it to spill over to the adjacent film frames, thus breaking out of its rectangular prison while at the same time being woven into the fluidity of moving body, the whiteness of light, and the redness of flesh. Using the photogram technique and my body as a tool and a means to inscribe myself into this film, “Scintillating Flesh” is a self-inscription, where the filmmaker is not so much its subject but becomes its form.
Director
In a dark room holding a flashlight in my hand, I paint with light. Each stroke of light unveils an image and permits it to spill over to the adjacent film frames, thus breaking out of its rectangular prison while at the same time being woven into the fluidity of moving body, the whiteness of light, and the redness of flesh. Using the photogram technique and my body as a tool and a means to inscribe myself into this film, “Scintillating Flesh” is a self-inscription, where the filmmaker is not so much its subject but becomes its form.
Director
“Song of the Firefly” is a visual poem which utilizes the camera-less photogram technique that was introduced in Pruska-Oldenhof's 2001 film “Light Magic.” “Song of the Firefly” transports the viewer to an open field on a warm summer night, where the luminous dance of the fireflies can be experienced. The exhuberant display of light, as each flash illuminates different portions of the field, reveals fragments of the space in which we are contained, leaving us always waiting in anticipation to see more.
Director
“Light Magic” utilizes and examines one of the earliest photographic processes, discovered at the birth of the photographic medium: the photogram. This technique combines science and art in order to record the process of transformation. Images created through this technique are traces of light that pass through each object, leaving their mark on the film surface. Photograms bring both the maker and the viewer closer to the object, thus revealing its essence - that neither the naked eye nor the camera lens could see.
Co-Director
Elder depicts forms of life that have grown increasingly out of touch with the body, and attempts to elicit and experience of the delight that results from reconnecting with our natural being
my I's is a visual journey through time, space, and memories of the filmmaker from her childhood to the present. Not parting with her Super 8 camera for four years, she accumulated a variety of images from different parts of the world and from different times of the year. She then combined these images with home movie footage of herself and her mother.
Director
my I's is a visual journey through time, space, and memories of the filmmaker from her childhood to the present. Not parting with her Super 8 camera for four years, she accumulated a variety of images from different parts of the world and from different times of the year. She then combined these images with home movie footage of herself and her mother.
