For the past six years, I sought out amateur travel films made by women in the first half of the 20th century, which I collected in an all-archival essay film, Terra Femme. In the process, I watched dozens of hours of footage of everything under the sun: biblical gardens, women doing laundry, ice fields, a tapir, mounds in a cemetery. Occasionally, there is a handwritten intertitle. “Crossing the Equator” reads one, and the filmmaker has added little serif marks to the letters in “Equator.” What follows is footage shot onboard a boat during a line-crossing ceremony, in which Poseidon and […]
by Courtney Stephens on Jul 12, 2021If nothing else, I owe Stan Brakhage for my irrational fear of childbirth ever since I was forced to sit through a collegiate projection of Window Water Baby Moving. Often polarizing for those new to the medium, it’s impossible to deny Brakhage’s ingenuity in his tactile use of film. His oeuvre seems to erase the boundary between method and the means by which to achieve it, which becomes all the more peculiar once you seem him in action. Phil Solomon, a fellow experimental filmmaker and collaborator, has uploaded a handful of videos of Brakhage, in the classroom and out, which The Seventh Art says will serve as the basis […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 21, 2014