Tuesday, July 16, 2024 at 7:30pm
Nine Films by Stephanie Barber
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
letters, notes, 1997, 16mm, 7 mins
3 peonies, 2017, 16mm, 3 mins
Catalog, 2005, 16mm, 11 mins
flower, the boy, the librarian, 1997, 16mm, 5 mins
Another Horizon, 2020, 16mm, 9 mins
shipfilm, 1998, 16mm, 4 mins
Dogs, 2000, 16mm, 15 mins
Total Power, dead dead dead, 2005, 16mm, 3 mins
oh my homeland, 2019, 16mm, 4 mins
Looking back on the resurgence of experimental cinema at the turn of the millennium, it’s clear that one of the most significant artists to emerge from that moment was Stephanie Barber, whose work in 16mm we’ll be surveying this evening. Her films have never hewed to a particular style or school—there is no echt Barber movie—though a distinctive and coherent sensibility animates each piece. Some are deceptively simple, composed of only a handful of elements, or even a single, unbroken shot. These achieve a kind of gnomic potency, whether by isolating a particularly rich detail, like the face of soprano Leontyne Price as she receives a final standing ovation, or through precise and unexpected juxtapositions, as with the plangent telegraphy of letters, notes, in which found missives are spelled out, character by character, atop faded snapshots.
Vernacular photography also figures prominently in Catalog, but through a radically different approach. Here the everyday images are restaged as tableaux vivants, with the original poses held stiffly by Barber’s friends, each picture a frozen moment brought back to life, made strange with every blink and breath. As elsewhere, the two-dimensional takes on a more physical, tactile character; a memory becomes a thing. For Another Horizon, Barber created a 36-foot long collage of landscapes, ripped from books and magazines, and shot it with a continuous rightward pan, its contours further traced by jagged scratches into the emulsion. Echoing across her imagined expanse is an impromptu sermon by the late Oswan Chamani (Richard Williams), priest and founder of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans, which Barber recorded in his apartment in 1995.
She maintains, throughout her films, a delicate balance of artifice and sincerity. This impulse finds a limit case with Dogs, in which the filmmaker acts out a philosophical discourse on the nature of art, emotion, and individualism, its effects undercut—and magnified—by the fact that her interlocutors are two papier mâché dog puppets with sad eyes. “Right now I’m interested in working with what might be considered ‘wrong choices,’” explains one ersatz canine, “making the viewer feel that uncomfortable feeling they feel when an artist has made the wrong choice. I don’t know, something too silly or obvious or sentimental.”
Tonight’s program will also feature a reading by Barber, and will be followed by a conversation.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.