May
15
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The
Films of Marjorie Keller
Introduced with personal notes by her husband, renowned film scholar P.
Adams Sitney.
Marjorie Keller (1950-1994) made approximately twenty films and wrote
The Untutored Eye : Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and
Brakhage and The Moon on the Porch [a pop-up book]. She
taught filmmaking at the University of Rhode Island and served as the
President of the Filmmakers Cooperative of New York. Her films have
rarely been screened in Los Angeles.
She/Va (1973, 16mm, color, silent, 3 min.)
A young dancer rechoreographed through film editing. This film was originally
made in standard 8mm, from a neighbor's home movies.
Daughters of Chaos (1980, 16mm, color, sound, 19-1/2 min.)
"The film deals simultaneously with girls becoming women, woman looking
back on her childhood. It is pervaded with voluptuousness, with longing:
the woman, disappointed in love, looking for lost innocence, the girl
yearning for the power of her sex."
--Anne Becker
The Answering Furrow (1985, 16mm, color, sound, 27 min.)
Owing to Virgil's Georgics. With assistance from Hollis Melton and Helene
Kaplan. Music: Charles Ives, "Sonata for Violin and Piano #4 (Children's
Day at the Camp Meeting)" and "Ambrosian Chant (Capella Musicale
del Duomo di Milano)." Filmed in Yorktown Heights, New York; St.
Remy en Provence, France; Mantua, Rome and Brindisi, Italy; and in Arcadia
and on the island of Kea in Greece.
Georgic I -- The annual produce first seen in spring -- The furrowed earth
ready for planting - The distribution, support and protection of young
plants -- The implements of the garden.
Georgic II -- The life of Virgil is recapitulated in summer, with a digression
on the sacred -- The sheep of Arcadia -- The handling of bees -- The pagan
Lion of Kea.
Georgic III -- The skill and industry of the old man in autumn -- Ancient
custom and modern method -- The use of implements of the garden.
Georgic IV -- The compost is prepared at season's end.
The filmmaker completes The Answering Furrow with the inclusion
of her own image. Note on the music: The music works with the image to
parallel the trace of history. Ives recalls Protestant hymns, which recall
the origin of the hymn in 12th century Milanese music, which allows for
that music closest (in my experience of making this film) to the hum of
bees and of amplifiers, the Orthodox Greek chant.
Herein (1991, 16mm, color, sound, 35 min.)
Herein charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking
through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI file obtained under the Freedom
of Information Act, Emma Goldman's autobiography, the making of films
on the Lower East Side in New York, street prostitution and drug addiction,
all inflect the sense of place, space and history.
-------
No study of the American avant-garde cinema would be complete without
mention of P. Adams Sitney's groundbreaking contributions to the
field. His seminal Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000
and edited collections, Film Culture Reader, and The Avant-Garde
Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism have provided lucid insight
for generations of film scholars and enthusiasts. P. Adams Sitney is Professor
of Visual Art at Princeton University and a current senior scholar at
the Getty Research Institute.
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