Praise!
Recent Work by Barbara Sternberg
“With
more than thirty years of activity in film, video and other arts behind her,
Barbara Sternberg has created one of the largest and most distinctive bodies of
work in Canadian experimental film. Informed by feminist thought and literature
(particularly Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf), the
tradition of the personal film, and an intense engagement with the everyday,
Sternberg’s films draw a world of feeling and meaning from quotidian images. As
she has stated in an interview, her films tend to “work through an accumulation
of the everyday, more through a glance than a look, less a controlling gaze
than an observational one.” Since the completion of a series of large-scale
works in the mid to late Nineties, her practice has moved away from language and
extended themes to a more intense moment-to-moment engagement in filming and
editing. This survey of three recent films and one video includes Burning, a rapid, rhythmic montage that
evokes the brevity of life, and Surfacing,
a revival of concerns for repetition and variation that have been important
throughout her films. Also, two world premieres: Tabula Rasa, which juxtaposes iconic images of the Virgin Mary—eternally
young, eternally welcoming, eternally weeping—with medical diagnoses and images
of the filmmaker’s own aging flesh; and Praise,
a buoyant poem in black and white. Barbara Sternberg will introduce tonight’s
program.” (Cinematheque