WOMEN PIONEERS

VIDEO INSTALLATIONS

Curated by Clare SchweitzerHelena Jonsdottir, Eva Lín Vilhjálmsdóttir  í samvinnu við MARVAÐA

Marvaða Exhibition

Women film artists - Writing Their Own Cinematic Language

”Screendance is a history of women’s filmmaking”

Kelly Hargraves (Dance Camera West) via Cara Hagan (ADF Movies by Movers/Dance on Camera)

As Cara Hagan notes in Screendance from Film to Festival (McFarland, 2022), women and other marginalized groups were drawn to film in its nascent existence, only to be shut out as the form became more industrialized. Furthermore, a lack of careful preservation of the form resulted in the loss of over 75% of films created before 1930 with entire directorial oeuvres lost including the majority of the filmographies of women filmmakers such as Alice Guy-Blanché and Lois Weber.

With this in mind, tracing the histories of screendance can prove to be a daunting task, though the traces that still survive can both inform us to an expanded understanding of the practice and caution us to the precarity of its preservation. The works presented highlight the both innovation of early artists of screendance and the forces that caused their work to be lost to time offering signposts to other artists in the field whose work is yet to receive their due.

Pioneer Women in Film and Video Art (1940s–1980s)This screening includes a curated selection from the San Francisco Dance Film Festival celebrating trailblazing women in film art and video art. In addition we add in a PCF selection of women film artists today.  These works remind us that experimentation has deep roots, and that many women have reshaped the language of cinema throughout history.

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Women film artists - Writing Their Own Cinematic Language Pioneering Women: Reimagining Space through the Transformation of Film and Video Art

Curator Clare Schweitzer of the San Francisco Dance Film Festival has selected a program of outstanding works celebrating pioneering women in film and video art (1940s–80s). Among them is dancer, choreographer, and video artist Analívia Cordeiro, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer dance and one of the first to integrate digital technology with choreography in the 1970s. At the same time, filmmaker Sara Kathryn Arledge began work in 1941 on her film Introspection, with the aim of “adding time to painting” and exploring movement as an extension of visual art. In addition to this program, PCF presents a special selection of works by contemporary women filmmakers. These works remind us that experimentation has deep roots, and that women have, throughout history, reshaped the language of cinema in many different ways.