Seven Women, Seven Sins
Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.
Helke Sander
Chantal Akerman
Bette Gordon
Ulrike Ottinger
Valie Export
Maxi Cohen
Laurence Gavron
Also Directed by Helke Sander
A documentary with fictious elements. Ms. Elisabeth (Lieschen) Müller from Austria comes to Bonn, Germany to find herself a man. During the search she investigates the connections between neckties, political power and prostitution, and tries to look for the influence the german feminist movement had on the men in Germany's capital.
Film by Helke Sander.
Documentary by Helke Sander, in collaboration with Harun Farocki (among others), about the campaign of the West German New Left against the publishing house Springer, particularly its control and manipulation of the news.
In a critique to the Berliner films that depicted labour problems always through masculine lens, Sander changes the point of view. Irene, single mother, works in a washing machine factory and has to deal with discrimination, sexual harassment and lack of solidarity.
No overview found.
A woman threatens to jump off a crane with her two young children in order to secure affordable housing. Won Golden Bear for Best Short at the 1985 International Film Festival Berlin.
Here is the third and last of three self-contained shorts by Helke Sander from her series of shorts entitled From the Reports of Security Guards & Patrol Services . BTW the numbering of the parts is a bit confusing, the only existing parts of the series are No. 1,5 and 8.
Directed by Helke Sander.
A documentary essay on the 1960s women's liberation movement in Germany and it's developments and conflicts through the following decades.
Also Directed by Chantal Akerman
Presented in 2 parts, this 83 minute piece documents Wieder-Atherton's idea to do a set of pieces from across central and eastern Europe, including Russia. Some weren't originally written for cello, but she had them transcribed. Some were songs for voices, which goes with Wieder-Atherton saying in an earlier film she made with Chantal Akerman that she aspires to play the cello in a way that it carries the specificity of emotion of the human voice. She explains at the beginning of both parts how she feels each country in the region has it's own personality expressed in its music, coming from its individual history and culture, but that each land in the area is also 'impregnated' as she puts it, by the others, so there are certain elements that run throughout.
When her mother moves in, the life of a writer gets crowded.
Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.
Made out of the last sequence of the film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 Seven monitors (in sync) video installation, color, sound . The monitors are placed on pedestals and displayed in a circle .
Documentary about humans dealing with changing technology, the basic concepts of communication, cinema, and Akerman's mother, seen in her Brussels apartment.
Furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back. This breakthrough formal experiment is Akerman's first film made in New York.
A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart.
Anna is a film director whose job takes her all over western Europe. In each place she either already has some intimate connection, or readily makes one. People seem drawn to her, but inevitably insist on sharing their inmost secrets and discontents with her, despite her obvious and profound lack of interest in these revelations. This does not deter Anna from continuing to meet people, and she genuinely connects with them occasionally, as when she sees her mother briefly in Brussels.
“My mother laughs prelude” is a performance from the book that Chantal made about her mother. In 2013, Akerman’s mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn’t talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. "My Mother Laughs" is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.
Also Directed by Bette Gordon
An ex-Navy man carrying out the last wish of a dying shipmate renews contact with old friends to break the code of silence around a mysterious, long-buried crime.
A meditation on the American rustic. Various objects within the composition are re-presented in unnatural colors and unusual spatial arrangements, emphasizing the illusion of movement while exploring film grain and graphic nature. The image of foreground and background becomes reversed, and through that process we lose sight of three-dimensional space representation.
A mom and her 10 year son motor around the country as she makes ends meet by turning tricks until her car breaks down. She then temporarily takes up with a hardware store owner until she gets her own place. Then the kid's father shows up to try to take the two over.
This recently unearthed and newly digitized work is a richly minimalist, single-camera-setup portrait of the sights and sounds at a late-night diner in Madison, WI.
A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.
Exchanges investigates mechanisms by which meaning is produced in film, through the interaction of the process of construction of a text and the social context which determines and is represented by that text.
Bette Gordon describes her first feature film as “a narrative derived from film’s own material and my concern for exploring issues of representation and identification in cinema."
A single action seen from alternative left and right perspectives, accentuating reversals, repetitions and persistence of vision. Rather than uniting opposites, rhythm is set up by the struggling eye, varying as the image is moved closer to and further from the screen's center. The sound, with its fragmentations and its implications of incompleteness, focuses attention on the impossibility of a resolution in the film's dichotomy. "Rather than crediting the camera with objectivity according to the usual convention in film, the viewer is confronted with the relativity of simultaneous multiple perspectives. The soundtrack underlines the arbitrary relationship between a sign and its signifier, as does Magritte's painting, Ceci n'est pas une pipe." – The Art Examiner
A psychiatrist faces his past, present and future when he finds himself involved in the treatment of a young man recently released from prison for a murder committed when the boy was just 11 years old.
Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.
Also Directed by Ulrike Ottinger
Six life stories of German, Austrian and Russian Jews which intersect in exile in Shanghai.
When, before the revolution, accidentally arrested, the philistine - a tsarist civil servant of high status - falls in deep, lethargic sleep. 20 years later he wakes up and finds himself in a post-revolutionary, still young Soviet Union. He is stunned. He is shocked. But a philistine always finds his way.
A document of the 10 days - in 1990 - leading up to the unification of the two German currencies.
In Echigo in Japan the snow often lies several feet deep well into May covering landscape and villages. Over the centuries the inhabitants have organised their lives accordingly. In order to record their very distinctive forms of everyday life, their festivals and religious rituals Ulrike Ottinger journeyed to the mythical snow country – accompanied by two Kabuki performers. Taking the parts of the students Takeo and Mako they follow in the footsteps of Bokushi Suzuki who in the mid-19th century wrote his remarkable book “Snow Country Tales”.
The notorious pirate ruler Madame X places a print ad, calling on women to escape their boring lives and promising "gold, love and adventure" to all who come aboard her ship, the Orlando. A motley crew including a housewife, diva and artist (played by Yvonne Rainer) embark on a quest for self-transformation, which quickly heads towards destruction as they are subjected to Madame X's sadistic, erotic escapades.
Still Moving is one of the director’s most personal films, offering some insight into her artistic process. It is an assemblage of her father’s African collection, photographs made by Ottinger in the 1970s, footage of a theatre play based on Johann Nestroy and a rare artefact: an 8mm film document of Lil Picard’s birthday celebration—an artist who mingled with the Dadaists and Warhol’s Factory alike. It is an exhibition in the form of a film, a dedication to an adventurer father, a secret art museum, a cabinet of wonder: a whole universe on its own. Welcome to the Little Theatre of Ulrike Ottinger!
In 1973, Wolf Vostell, an artist associated with Fluxus, made a happening in which participants were required to perform a series of ritual, obsessive actions, such as “go to the trunk of your vehicle, there open and close the trunk 750 times and 375 times put a white plate in it and take it out 375 times.” Described by Ottinger as a documentation of what Vostell called “dé-coll/age-happening”, the film is an illustration of her creative method, a surrealist act, a separate work of art, and a strange object. She would later describe her method as “fragments of reality assembled in an unusual manner”.
Ulrike Ottinger’s provocative mélange of ethnography, stunning tableaux and baroque vignettes was inspired by what she calls the “well-stocked miracle” of Korean wedding chests, assembled according to time-honored customs. This exploration of love and marriage in South Korea looks closely at ancient and present-day rituals, revealing what is old in the new and new in the old. Her inquiry leads us from shamans, temples and priests, to the enchanted maze of 21st-century Seoul, where vendors of medicinal herbs co-exist with high-tech beauty salons for wedding couples and secular marriage palaces. Using film much like a canvas, Ottinger creates a modern fairytale flush with mythological heroes, traditional rites, ancestral symbolism, dreams of eternal love, and a whole lot of Western kitsch. One of her most acclaimed documentaries, it captures the amazing phenomenon of new mega-cities and their contradictory societies caught in a balancing act.
FREAK ORLANDO is divided into five more-or-less distinct sections, all featuring "Freak" Orlando, a woman, played by the late Magdalena Montezuma, who appears in various guises, and deformities, throughout.
A group of cosmopolitan women passengers aboard the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian Railway are taken prisoner by Ulan Iga, a warrior princess.
Also Directed by Valie Export
Man & Woman & Animal shows a woman finding pleasure in herself, the whole film is a kind of assertion and affirmation of female sexuality and its independence from male values and pleasures... (Joana Kiernan)
Breath Text is a powerfully simple performance in which VALIE EXPORT creates tension by breathing compulsively. “she breathes heavily at the video camera lens while slowly moving her face across it, fogging up the entire space with her lung’s volume. Her piece takes Olson’s breathy poem ‘Gli Amanti’ a step further, not just aiming to capture the particularities of one’s pronunciation in an individual speech act but substituting the specific make her body creates – her ‘breath text,’ the moist gasp on the window glass in front of her – for the signs one would use to write an actual, linguistic ‘love poem.’” – Lisa Siraganian
"The body as carrier of information, in order to convey both spiritual and physical contents, is the reflected image of the internal/psychological and of the external/institutional reality." – VALIE EXPORT “By means of symbolic gestures, a sentence is delivered in sign language, whose wording may only be understood at the end of the performance when the camera pans over a line written on a piece of paper. This is how Sehtext: Fingergedicht defies our concepts of immediate listening and comprehension associated with both hearing and sight. If a literally physical ‘becoming action’ of the verbal is performed, through a language of gestures – in showing by speaking and saying by showing – we can thus identify a dismantling of the hierarchy of the sensory system.” – Sabeth Buchmann
A recording of Valie Export’s performance from the 2007 Venice Biennale, filmed with a laryngoscope camera inside her throat.
Adjunct Dislocations II documents a technically inventive performance. VALIE EXPORT moves along a track with two closed-circuit cameras that are facing different directions and are focused upon patterned screens. Her action creates changing linear shapes on monitor banks within the space.
“A medical camera films the vaginal area of performer VALIE EXPORT. It penetrates her body. In the same way as in various installations that investigate the origin of the voice through filming of the glottis, the vagina´s interior is made visible here for the purpose of demonstrating what happens inside the body.” – Brigitta Burger-Utzer
The body and specifically the "woman's body" is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export's notion of "body language" poses an ironic relation to these questions that acknowledges "the end of the body" or at least the final break with the way in which we understand it to be a biological, existential, or metaphysical entity. Export has broken away from any notion of unity - either body, space, or time - into the fragmented world of doubling and difference that is caught in representation.
“The Duality of Nature is an experimental video that deals with the 'duality of nature', in other words natural nature and technical nature. Nature is always a construction, whether in dynamic processes, dis-analog systems or physical, technical signals. 'Nature' formulates the organizational forms of representational strategies - symbolic structures, both in reality and in fiction. Where are the borders, the interfaces, the de-bordering and the analogies for ‘natural’ nature and ‘technical’ nature? These considerations provided the basis for the video.” – VALIE EXPORT
“The narrow passage or dangerous passage is a common motif in both funerary and initiation mythologies. I step inside and move through a corridor of electrically charged wires, constantly experiencing painful shocks and sinking to the floor. But I accept the challenge and, in a somewhat pathological increase in willpower, I press my head against the wires again and again. Society is a closed, structured space, which regulates all human energy through painful barriers. Only through an effort of will to overcome the pain (which is at the core of society) is one able to achieve a state of free expression.” – VALIE EXPORT
Also Directed by Maxi Cohen
Joe and Maxi is a film about Maxi Cohen's relationship with her father, made when she was 23 and after her mother died of cancer. This intimate and revealing documentary portrait of a family reveals the barriers to expressing and accepting love.
Intimate Interviews: Sex in Less than Two Minutes is a poetic repartee on the subject of sex, featuring performance artists.
In 1986, filmmaker Maxi Cohen was one of seven women filmmakers commissioned by German television to interpret the Seven Deadly Sins. She was given the sin of “anger” and began by putting an advertisement in The Village Voice that read, “What makes you angry?” Along with fellow filmmaker Joel Gold, she recorded the conversations with the people who replied. This exploration lead to a heart-wrenching and emotional film that shows the complexity of anger and its origins. Thirty four years later, Anger continues to resonate, especially as health, economic and political turmoil place anger at the forefront.
Cape May: End of the Season captures the individuality and idiosyncrasy of the beach community of Cape May, New Jersey. Cohen’s interviews along the seashore with retired vacationers who linger after Labor Day reveal a clichéd, postcard world crystallized in a whimsical reverie devoid of sorrow or youth. The good-natured relaxation of the elderly couples, interspersed with picturesque miniature golf courses and a shimmering empty beach, reveals the autumnal mood of the waning season and the twilight of old age.
South Central Los Angeles: Inside Voices was made in 1993 and 1994, in three languages, by African Americans, Latinos, Korean Americans and whites living and working in the areas most affected by the devastation caused by the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Using Hi-8 video cameras, the individuals tell their own stories of struggle and triumph in the midst of social upheaval. Through the intimate, honest and direct portraits of life in crisis, issues of class, race and prejudice are revealed in ways rarely seen in television news footage.
Second Grade Dreams, filmed at P. S. 255 in Brooklyn, New York, is a series of brief vignettes of second-grade schoolchildren who recount their dreams and nightmares. The straightforward, stationary camera captures the children as their stories unfold, revealing both humorous and horrifying dreams about dinosaurs, blood and chocolate bars.
Las Vegas: Last Oasis in America is an irreverent exploration of this uniquely American city, which thrives on transience and celebrates wealth and instant success. Cohen's tour of Las Vegas includes a visit to the Liberace Museum, where the pianist's brother treats Cohen and her crew to a reverential look at Liberace memorabilia, as well as the casinos where patrons gather with intense concentration at the gaming tables. Cohen portrays a culture of high expectations and inevitable disappointment, exhibiting humor and empathy for the people who win and lose in the money-society of "the strip."
Also Directed by Laurence Gavron
Rather than taking the making-of approach, Ninki Nanka, The Prince of Colobane used the filming of Mambéty’s Hyenas, which he wrote, directed, and acted in, as a pretext to examine his character. Following him throughout the shoot and also paying visits to his family and childhood friends, Laurence Gavron set off on a quest to find the real Djibril.