Breaking the Frame: A Portrait of Carolee Schneemann
Breaking the Frame, Courtesy Marielle Nitoslawska and Picture Palace Pictures
Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents
Breaking the Frame
A portrait of Carolee Schneemann by Marielle Nitoslawska
Thursday, July 25, 2019, 7:00pm
At MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawska in person! Los Angeles premiere!
The loss of pioneering artist Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) in March affected us deeply, as her boundary and taboo-shattering works in painting, performance, and film have helped revolutionize art in the past five decades. Using her own body as a medium, Schneemann’s most well-known pieces Meat Joy (1964), the film Fuses (1967), Interior Scroll (1975, performed live at Telluride in 1977), and Up to and Including Her Limits (1973-1976), shattered the taboos against the representation of sexuality and the female body. Yet while these pieces scandalized the male-dominated art world, they also irrevocably transformed the history of art. The finest portrait of Schneemann, and a remarkable film by any regard, is Marielle Nitoslawska’s Breaking the Frame (Canada, 2012, digital, 100 minutes), which incredibly has not yet played in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA is delighted to host the LA premiere, especially as a whole sequence of the film is from MOCA’s exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.
Shot and utilizing a variety of formats (35/16/8mm, HD) over a period of six years,and utilizing a rich variety of film and hi-definition formats, Breaking The Frame can be described as a kinetic, hyper-cinematic intervention, a critical meditation on the relation of art to the physical, domestic and conceptual aspects of daily life and on the attributes of memory. It uses Schneemann’s autobiographical materials to narrate the historic upheaval within Western art in post-war America.
Tickets: $15 general; $10 for seniors; $8 for students with ID; free for Filmforum and MOCA members. Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4248941 or at the door.
For more information: https://www.moca.org/program/filmforum-at-moca-presents-breaking-the-frame, www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238, 213/621-1745 or education@moca.org
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Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA furthers MOCA’s mission to question and adapt to the changing definitions of art and to care for the urgency of contemporary expression with bimonthly screenings of film and video organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum—the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, video, documentary, and animation.
Education Programs at MOCA, including Contemporary Art Start and Sunday Studio, and the MOCA Teen Program, are generously supported by The Hearst Foundations, Banc of California, MOCA Projects Council, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation, Edison International, Joseph Drown Foundation, The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, Satterberg Foundation, Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, Michael Asher Foundation, The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, The Rhonda S. Zinner Foundation, The Winnick Family Foundation, and Pazia Bermudez-Silverman.
For more on Los Angeles Filmforum, visit lafilmforum.org, or email lafilmforum@yahoo.com.
For more information on The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, visit moca.org.
Breaking the Frame, Courtesy Marielle Nitoslawska and Picture Palace Pictures
Breaking the Frame
Canada, 2012, HD, color, sound, 100 minutes
Los Angeles premiere!
Featuring Carolee Schneemann.
World premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in 2012.
Breaking The Frame is a feature length documentary portrait of the New York artist Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) by Canadian filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawska. A pioneer of performance and body art as well as avant-garde cinema, Schneemann broke the frames of the art world for five decades, in a variety of mediums, challenging assumptions of feminism, gender, sexuality, and identity. She received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2017,
The film captures Schneemann, in her own words, images and reflections, at work, at home, in the studio, and interweaves extensive film excerpts from her groundbreaking film work in both super 8 and 16mm such as Fuses (1967); Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-76), with documentation of performances including Meat Joy (1964); Interior Scroll (1975) and more recent museum commissions and exhibitions. By highlighting the sheen of photographic prints, the fibers of diary pages and the gloss of wet paint, Breaking The Frame provides a textured mise-en-scene that resonates with Schneemann’s corporeal focus. The visual composition is complemented by a soundtrack featuring the music of composer James Tenney, Schneemann’s companion and collaborator for many years, and the two remained close friends until his death in 2006.
Ultimately, Breaking The Frame presents the artist’s recollections and meditations on life/work in order to pose the questions what is space, where is form, and how do we look? By eschewing standard chronologies, Nitoslawska explores the way filmic strategies complicate the traditional understanding of memory as an act of narration and investigates the complexities of the use of visual images as a form of historical testimony.