“Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor ” wins Jury Prize at Festival Curtas Belo Horizante
Lynne attends festival and also teaches workshop on collaborative filmmaking.
August 2018
“Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor” won the Honorable Mention Jury Prize at the Festcurtas Belo Horizante, Brazil in August. Here is the translation of the jury’s thoughts on the film:
“Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor” creates a path that moves from the gesture of an initial encounter to an aesthetic manifestation — through the manipulation of images, textures and movements. In this way, the film presents a different kind of documentary, bringing to the forefront a human landscape that opens up through intimate contact between the director and three women pioneers in the history of experimental film.
Many thanks to Ana Siqueira for the warm welcome to the festival, to both Ana and Zita Nunes for their translation and to Carolee Schneeman, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson for being such amazing human beings and dear friends.
Film as a Collaborative Art: A Hybrid Media and Performance Workshop
What kind of creative surprises can happen when people who don’t know each other come together for a couple of days to make a film? In this workshop, we will work together for two mornings as a group to create a series of single-shot videos using complex mise en scène, unusual camera movements, and recycled or hand-made props from home. Each participant will have a chance to direct their own component of the piece. Throughout the encounters, workshop leader Lynne Sachs will present a series of experimental performance videos made by her and by artists such as Vito Acconci, Eadweard Muybridge, Chantal Akerman, Christopher Harris and Keith Haring. These short artist works will certainly stretch everyone’s idea of what a moving image art work can be. At the end of the last encounter, we will show the work and the participants are encouraged to invite others to watch. As a group, we will read excerpts from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (in Portuguese) as a way to embark in this shared, artistic experience.
Twenty editions. If the event makes us very proud, it also comes with the acknowledgment of a path made possible by several people, much beyond what fits in a restricted credits list, and the responsibility of being on par a with its history. To live up to the path of this festival, of public character since its conception, means, first of all, not letting the aesthetic, political and ethical restlessness that moves us, disconcert us, insistently put us into question, to be smoothed over. This restlessness has been, more than ever, stimulated by the transformations in the production, circulation and legitimation of films and the thinking made upon them. Year after year we have followed and celebrated the extraordinary growth of the production by historical subjects who have for too long been relegated almost exclusively to object of cinema’s gaze, as part of a broader political process that has deeply affected our ways of watching, judging, selecting and thinking cinema and the structures that support it, impacting not only the selection of films, but also the diverse activities and practices that make up a festival.
Jury Notes for prize in Portugese:
“Um caminho que vai do gesto do encontro à sua manifestação estética por meio do domínio sobre as imagens, suas texturas e movimentos. Surge assim um filme que se coloca como uma outra possibilidade documental, trazendo paisagens humanas que se abrem a partir do contato direto entre uma diretora e três mulheres pioneiras para a história do cinema experimental. Por conseguir capturar as especificidades estéticas da obra de cada uma dessas mulheres em três cápsulas de imagens, a Menção Honrosa do Fest Curtas BH vai para Carolee, Barbara e Gunvor, de Lynne Sachs.”