“Sight and
sound are central components of memory, and likewise of the cinema.
With Beating, Barbara Sternberg challenges our understanding of
the relationship between memory and cinema by challenging us to
see and hear a highly controlled flow of images and sounds that
collide, fragment and flicker, to create a landscape of impressions
that are both mystifying and provocative. At the same time she deals
with issues that are by no means easy to grapple with. Images of
Nazis, sexual organs, lynched Jews, and a couple that appear to
be involved in a dance that evokes a sexual struggle are just a
few of the powerful images that stay with one long after the film
is over. Sternberg's film has a 25-part structure that at times
hardly seems to exist because of the fluidity and purpose with which
each shot meets the next. The depth of the filmic text (which itself
borrows from texts of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Hélène
Cixous, and Hannah Arendt) is matched by the intricate depth of
the projected images (many of which have gone through generations
of optical printing) and sounds. The intellectualizing here never
veers into pure abstraction; it is always grounded in the world,
whether through the evocation of memory or through the images from
nature. These moments of natural beauty and repose both contrast
with and provide a reprieve from the density of the text itself;
this repose, however, is one of continuous movement, and while that
may seem paradoxical, one must recognize that although the film
is never far from the beauty and colour of its sensuous imagery,
it is also never far from its scratches; its black-and-white negative
photography; and finally the specter of Nazism and the danger of
forgetting the Patriarchal seeds which bred it. Ultimately we are
forced, through the strength of the images and the intensity of
Sternberg's vision, to remember what we have seen, what we have
heard, and what we have lived through in time.”
(Jeffrey Lambert,
San Francisco Cinemateque Programme Notes) Beating again some day and your other films.