MEDIATHEK

Drei Tanz-Filme aus den 1970er Jahren: "Transport", "Dervish", "Element". Zusätzlich zu "Transport": ein Prequel'For God while sleeping' und zu "Element" das Sequel 'Tides'. "Amy Greenfield developed a new form of video dance, choreographing for the video camera and television screen." (The Museum Of Modern Art) Transport (1971) 16mm, color, sound, 5.5 min / Genre: Experimental Camera: Sandy D'Annunzio; Performers: Lee Vogt, Amy Greenfield; Sound: Optical Synthesizer. TRANSPORT came out of many influences in the early 1970s: the dead of Vietnam; the poem by my poetry teacher Anne Sexton, "For God While Sleeping"; the post-modern dance experiments with trust, to give yourself totally while being lifted by another; and the airborne astronauts of moon exploration. In the film, a man, then a woman, are lifted from the ground and are carried through space. Most of the film is seen upside-down against the white sky. The man and woman never meet. Their relationship is made entirely through the film editing. They move between ground and sky, between death (dead weight), through gravity (conflict weight) toward space (floating space). Finally, they break out into space and are borne along as if flying through the white air. Awards: Second Prize, Yale Film Festival; Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum, Austria. Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Film Forum, NY. Dervish 2 (1972) 16mm, color, sound, 18 min / Genre: Experimental Directed, choreographed, and performed by Amy Greenfield. Camera: Wilson Barber; Switching: Tony Grante; Colorization: Pee Bode. One of the first creative videodance tapes made. The Museum of Modern Art says "[Greenfield] developed a new genre of videodance, choreographing movement for the area framed by the video camera and the television screen." "For twenty minutes we watch Greenfield, wrapped in a white sheet, simply spin. The ceaseless repetition makes us lose our sense of time and gives the dynamic movement an object-like permanence. And yet, the actual physicality of her body also seems to dissolve. Subtle superimpositions of alternate camera views create delicate image transparencies while the whippings of the sheet across the monitor screen emit luminous stroboscopic flickerings. Rhythmic ambient sounds of shuffling and breathing reinforce the hypnotic effects of optical repetition." -- Richerd Lorber, Arts in Society "A range of dance extraordinary in its closeness and fragility." -- ArtsCanada Awards: First Int'l Women's Video Festival, Toronto, Canada; Video Roma, Italy. Part of the collection of Lincoln Center Dance Collection and Anthology Film Archives Video Collection. Element (1973) 16mm, black and white, silent, 12 min / Genre: Experimental Camera: Hilary Harris; Performer: Amy Greenfield. ELEMENT, like TIDES, raises issues of the active image of a woman's body on film. The two films are counterparts and are ideally screened together. The woman's body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle which is both birthlike and deathlike and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal area of female sensuality. "In the well-known ELEMENT, Greenfield rolls and seethes and plunges in a field of mud, her hair, her face, her naked body [are] not just slathered with mud but become a part of it ...." -- Deborah Jowitt, dance critic, The Village Voice Exhibition: Toulon Int'l Festival; Whitney Museum of American Art; Third Int'l Avant-Garde Film Festival, London; Film Forum, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY. Tides (1982) 16mm, color, sound, 12.25 min. / Genre: Experimental Camera: Hilary Harris; Performer: Amy Greenfield. The literary sources for TIDES came from Isadora Duncan's "The Dance of the Future," Maya Deren's script for the unfilmed passages of Ritual In Transfigured Time, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. "TIDES is a cinema-dance dealing with the theme and image of woman and ocean. The entire film was shot with a high speed camera, creating action from two to twenty times slower than normal speed. Because of this extreme slow motion, the surge and flow of the woman's nude body and the waves becomes intensely felt, continually moving cinematic imagery. "TIDES alludes to the very romantic confrontation of the human being and the elements as participants in a centuries-old drama. The film is introduced by a quote from Isadora Duncan's 'The Dance of the Future,' and proceeds to visualize the woman -- the filmmaker herself -- first rolling into the heart of the wave, then moving with, against, under, into the waves, until, at the end of the film, her whole body shouts with joy." -- 16th Edinburgh International Film Festival Exhibition: London Film Festival, 1982; Edinburgh Film Festival, 1982; Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1983; NY Shakespeare Public Theatre, 1983. (Quelle: film-makerscoop.com) (dS) Master DVD in UdK Bibliothek: Signatur SK 3620