FILMS & VIDEOS BY CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN

Anthology and EAI join together to present a program featuring some of our favorite film and video works by Carolee Schneemann. These pieces center on Schneemann's physical approach to filmmaking as well as her feline fixations. The program screens in tandem with Breaking the Frame, Marielle Nitoslawska's engrossing and insightful portrait of Schneemann's multimedia work and uncharacterizable life.

Founded in 1971, EAI is a nonprofit resource that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution, and preservation of media art. For more info, visit www.eai.org.

CARL RUGGLES CHRISTMAS BREAKFAST (1963/2007, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital video)
In her earliest film Schneemann presents an abstracted portrait of the American composer Carl Ruggles, known for his irascible personality and finely-crafted atonal music.

FUSES (1965-67, 30 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center.)
"[A] notorious masterpiece, a silent celebration in color of heterosexual love making, the film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, super-imposition and layering of abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself... FUSES succeeds perhaps more than any other film in objectifying the sexual streamings of the body's mind.' " THE GUARDIAN

PLUMB LINE (1968-71, 15 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm)
The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve, until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance.

MYSTERIES OF THE PUSSIES (1998-2010, 5.5 min, digital video)
In this performance lecture, Schneemann and Teija Lammi, museum librarian at the Porin Taidemuseo in Pori, Finland, physically respond to projected images of the artist's cats. As Schneemann interprets into poetry her own research on gender and feline abuse, Lammi translates Schneemann's words into Finnish.

CATSCAN (1988, 13 min, digital video)
A group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief, and spirits of the dead.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.