LIGHT SLEEPING is an erotic fantasy of sensual love between a human and an animal ... a woman and a cat. Each comes to this meeting joyously, each gives and receives affection. During this sensual encounter, human and animal spirits are joined, become one. Human and animal become like each other, and become more than what they are by themselves ....
The inspiration for the film came from Karu, the black male cat who lives with me. The woman is myself played by my friend Georgianna, who is a natural "cat-lover." And on one level the film has a special meaning for any who may feel close to the cat spirit, or appreciative of cat psyche and movement and being. But I hope people can have a purely intuitive flight of imagination response/understanding of this dream of woman and cat ....
The sounds do not destroy the visuals, but are one with the visuals, are sourced in the visuals, and so, sound and visual work with, not against, each other.
1975, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
This is an experimental film with several experimental concerns, but mainly attempts to explore relationships between text and image. The text is a series of love letters and the theme is to objectify adolescent romantic love. The image centers on a typical romantic scene, a woman seated in a landscape reading a love letter. RECITAL is structured as a stream-of-consciousness narrative, and is feminist in the sense that there is a chorus of women's voices telling a feminine perspective of a part of every woman's social conditioning.
"Stephanie Beroes' film, RECITAL, addresses the state of 'woman in love.' As opposed, however, to a Lawrentian reading of the situation - a cascade of images of erotic transcendence - Beroes takes a more distanced look at the phenomenon. And it is one that views the situations as fraught less with ecstasy than with risk and pain. ... Beroes' goal is a kind of distanced deconstruction of the experience, in an attempt to view it with the lessons of knowledge and time." - Lucy Fisher, film critic and scholar, New York
1978, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
Inspired by Merleau-Ponty's statement, "there is a perpetual uneasiness in the state of being conscious," this film has to do with questions of perception, the way we see things. In an experimental, non-narrative context, the film presents a man and a woman who carry on a disjunctive conversation, superficially about the effects of illness on perception, actually about their mutual inability to perceive the world from any other than a personal viewpoint. They each set up a projector and show each other footage of their respective hallucinations under the influence of fever - images of the desert, palms, swimming pools, and the American suburban landscape. The hallucination sequences make a lyrical counterpoint to the formal, structured lip-sync sequences.
"[A] graceful craft evident in everything from the hand-held camerawork to the jump cuts and other kinds of transitions." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Soho Weekly News
1979, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
"DEBT BEGINS AT TWENTY, by combining semi-fictionalized and documentary material, is as definitive a record of the Pittsburgh punk scene during its nascent underground phase as anyone could possibly hope for. That it also succeeds as an extremely engaging character study of some of the movement's most colorful figures is a testament to Stephanie Beroes' facility for combining a series of 'miniatures' with empathy as well as to the unusually natural character of the participants in what elsewhere has been an excruciatingly arch subculture." - W.T. Koltek, WYEP-Radio, Pittsburgh
"An 'AKG mike' is indicated, Dick Tracy-like, with an arrow in one subtitle over a shot that allegedly shows us (Bill) Bored sitting alone; and when Sesame Spinelli, a vocalist with the Dykes, looks up the hero in the final sequence (preceded by the title 'Six Months Earlier') and winds up making love with him to a joyfully gyrating camera, the self-conscious acting and embarrassed, banal dialogue between them is happily lingered over. DEBT BEGINS AT TWENTY provides as much honest fun as a day on the beach." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Soho Weekly News
1980, 16mm, b&w/so, 40m, $120
"In THE DREAM SCREEN, Stephanie Beroes' concern is with the positioning of woman in the cinematic and cultural imagination. She employs, as her central trope, the legend of Pandora's box - a focus that allows her to examine woman's figuration in both a classical film and an ancient myth. THE DREAM SCREEN proceeds as a multilayered experimental narrative - that operates on three distinct levels. It intercuts footage from the silent film, Pandora's Box (1929), with Beroes' own drama of a modern-day equivalent of Pabst's 'femme fatale.' The sound track intensifies this melange by providing commentary on the career of Louise Brooks - taken from her autobiography. Superimposed on these segments is a third tier of interview material with a contemporary Louise Brooks look-alike, who discusses her problematic relationship with her father. Through this intertextual montage, Beroes not only re-writes the Pabst classic, but examines the mythification of woman, and its articulation in the cinema." - Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh
1986, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 45m, $135