"Donna Cameron is an artist whose vigorous presence in New York has contributed significantly to making it the vital center of the independent film movement. Her curiosity is widespread. ... She's also a painter, writer, photographer, etc., etc. Nothing is safe, neither people nor objects, from the creative appetite of Donna Cameron. If nothing else, I treasure her because she made a film about one of our most important independent artists - a woman I adored - Shirley Clarke.
"Donna works with memory, feelings, poetry, texture, and follows her intuition, as well as with technique and formal invention. If Donna can't make something one way, she'll just find another. In a way she's a chameleon: All styles are fair game. But, at the core, there's always a moral center. I hope she continues to stay here in New York to nudge us - to push us to our limits. ..." - Adrienne Mancia, Curator of Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art, NY
"Donna Cameron attended the Rhode Island School of Design and received a BFA degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied painting, photography and filmmaking. She wrote stories and produced photo essays about people on the Florida Keys for the Miami Herald, and continued her studies in painting and drawing in Paris in the early eighties. ... [H]er paintings, photographs and films have been exhibited nationwide." - Cineprobe program notes, The Museum of Modern Art, NY
I explore film as a visual artist as opposed to as a commercial producer. I feel that film and painting are mediums which are similar in that creating with them, the artist builds up the image - in film with the frame, in painting with the brush stroke - to record a moment in time.
A film made from the January 1, 1979 issue of Newsweek magazine and from handmade, organic papers and fibers - cotton, linen, rice, etc. The news is rolled out at you, with increasing speed (God help you if you don't remember what they said); the film itself is like the flipping of pages. The news - nonsense, organic fibers, and all - is thrown out-of-focus and off-the-screen.
1978-1980, 16mm, color/si, 9m, $25
A film shot in the USA and Europe concerning myth as geographic time. The unicorn is a symbol of transformation, becomes frame-of-vision reference for a small boy and a young man. The magic of this imaginary beast transforms the man, but eluding the child, remains elemental and untamed.
1985, 16mm, color/si, 20m, $60
A film composed of an unused end of NEW MOON and printed to work visually with a segment of J.S. Bach's Suite in G Minor for Lute.
1985-1986, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
A red psychodrama about gambling. This found footage film, originally made by the Mormons as a morality film in the 1950s, has been re-edited to create a surreal world through which the characters pass in a trance-like state. The film exploits the original found object's faded emulsion, which is red; a hellish nightmare emerges.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $40
A melange of found footage edited to reassemble, in its frayed images and scratchy soundtrack, an old newsreel. It is concerned with the vulnerability of the persons photographed and the ease with which commercial editing exploits and presents both men and women as robotoids and life as a game which only a football or a coconut can win. Within minutes the characters lose their identities and the film begins talking with itself, as if lived and fought between the splices, among its pieces, behind the images themselves.
1980-1987, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
Second in a series of paper films made from strips of color Xerography. In these films, the filmmaker is concerned with the film as an object or motion picture "soft sculpture" constructed of 16mm-sized strips. The paper (or emulsion) could be a kind of skin complete with hair and pores, half-tone dots, paper fiber - through which the world is viewed.
1983-1987, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $35
A red camp film. The desert is for the birds? Surreal, but real. Originally shot in the '60s in Kuwait, this story of falconry has been rephotographed, re-recorded and re-edited to bring the sad zaniness of sport to the screen, in livid color.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 13m, $40
A film poem shot in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Huntsville, Alabama and New York City in which missiles, bricks, huts, humanoid-types and people emerge from civilization's whimsical debris. The Apocalypse - now and after. The bomb is in YOU.
1987, 16mm, color/si, 14m, $40
"TYGER TYGER and FAUVE are paper emulsion films made from everyday objects, photos and photographic studies of New York City. The paper emulsion film is a process of film making which I developed in 1978, and which I have been using and improving since. I think of these films as symphonic, or pictorially musical. ... The structure itself is a carefully constructed three-dimensional, multi-layered collage. The various papers, objects, pieces of photos which comprise the 'emulsion' are sandwiched between (a) clear tape strips, (b) paper strips treated with SIAB (a Kodak chemical that makes paper transparent and increases resiliency), or (c) layered between pieces of other objects.
"In TYGER TYGER, a 40-minute paper film portrait of New York City, I explore the possibility of film as a geofactive medium. ... This imagined place, filmic New York, exists. It is tactile and energetic. This is a result of the physical nature of this film. There are no frame lines in the original film. These 16mm sized soft sculptures are visual rhythm strips. The frame line or meter is imposed upon, and then recorded from, the original film object by me and by my camera (or printer)." - From notes by the filmmaker
1990, 16mm, color/so, 40m, $135
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $80 Other
In CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DUPLICATE, which is a personal documentary/meditation on the death of her sister, she describes the film as "what one feels, having to survive a loved one who is violently murdered, whose body is found with nothing to identify it but teeth and fingerprints." It is deliberately filmed as a home video and incorporates the familiar elemental sounds and sights (wind, water, traffic) into the picture and dialogue, alluding to the many levels on which a person is affected by such as tragedy.
"CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DUPLICATE is a powerful and moving experience. In my general understanding the artist works alone and rarely achieves any level of synergy with the sum total of all the aims of an exhibit.
"Your work superseded our general expectations for the show. It surprised and astounded many of us with its Chills of Truth. It's time we got back on track in the context of Art and Content. Bravery, fortitude, generosity and wisdom are important values to share with the art public ....
"Rationally, the very personal topic of the death of a loved one is a difficult subject for one to image in a work of fine art. It is obvious to me that you succeeded, with grace. Thank you for sharing this with us." - Charles Mingus III, Artist-Curator, "Reflections: A Legacy Unearthed, Discovery of the Duane St. Burial Site," New York
1991, VHS, color/so, 56m, $75 Home; $200 Other
Sound: Peter Wetzler
FAUVE is a paper film made by a unique paper process which I invented and have employed here as a monochromatic study of rhythm and mood and the physics of light waves leaving a source - one sees the red, or longest waves, first, the blue, or shortest waves, last, and in my film, one's left in the UV light world of peripheral vision. The original score by Peter Wetzler adds to the textural, tactile, visual experience of FAUVE.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $35
(ONCE UPON A TIME) is an abstract comic book in film form. The paper emulsion is made of French comics which I collected while I lived in Paris, France. Many of the papers were arranged to age and yellow for up to ten years, allowing for the eerie pale yellow light in much of the film.
When I lived in Paris, I lived across the street from the Musée Cluny. I went there almost every day, and was struck by the oldness of all the things exhibited there, especially the manuscripts and the stone sculptures and crypts. There was something in the light and the quietude there that was vital to my development as an artist, and it has stayed with me to this day.
In this film, by daily collecting and processing the paper, and then by leaving it aside to age, and then years later returning to print and record it, I have captured, in the image, and the quality of the images, the light that followed me into the Musée Cluny, that exists in that time and place.
In its romancing of the lens, the film voice is backed by contemporary keyboard music. With music by Trans-Am.
1992, 16mm, color/so, 40m, $135
The splendor and pleasures of Autumn are the focus of this richly textured and brilliantly colored paper emulsion film. The sound is a recording of the filmmaker ripping, rustling and tearing various kinds of paper. These sounds have been synthesized and musically arranged to echo the imaging of the synthesis paper. A reel of paper and fallen leaves unwinds amid calls of birds and the laughter of delighted children.
"Donna Cameron's work crosses the boundaries of film and painting. Her paper emulsion films are made via a process closer to assemblage than photography and draw attention to the sensuous properties of the celluloid medium." - Richard Herskowitz, Newsletter of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY
"Donna Cameron is a diehard New Yorker whose art mirrors that city's pulse." - Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun-Times
"Brooklyn native Donna Cameron's films are warm, humorous and well crafted. ... The remarkable thing about her [work] is her sensitivity to the rapid flow of textures. ... Cameron's technique has evolved into a highly sculptural motion picture painting." - Helen Knode, LA Weekly
Award: Winner, Juror's Citation Honors, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1995
1994, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $40
CANVAS is an enclosure, as is any body of painting. It engages the act of painting: movement, gesture, pigment, orientation, space and the act of filming. The frames are the accruence of pigment, oils, dyes, gesso, applied with brushes, knives and hands to the surface. The surface, or emulsion, is either my own paper emulsion or commercial Kodak emulsion and has been treated to represent open-weave linen. To my sensibility, the screen, either film or video, or the canvas, are synonymous - they are the medium through which the image passes.
1995, VHS, color/so, 22m, $60 Home; $150 Other
The music in DRAGON is an excerpt from "La Reine Verte" by French avant-garde composer/musician Pierre Henry. This track is courtesy of Polygram Special Markets. The dragon motif has always been an essential one in humankind's attempt to liberate itself from the struggle between good and evil.
The film DRAGON is such a representation. Light, in the form of fire, is freed from darkness, in the form of the film's frameline. Life (a gargantuan plant) weaves its tangled web around the living (children performing the chore of shoveling snow). Death (the dragon) is omni-present, an angel at once visible and invisible. In the end the conscious (the film image) is liberated from the unconscious (the soundtrack) and the departed soul achieves immortality in the cycle of the ring of fire.
DRAGON was shot and solarized on ECO (Ektachrome Commercial Reversal Film) a decade after Kodak discontinued it. This extinct filmstock had a capacity for rendering subtle tones and definition as yet unparalleled.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $35
1996, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $25
Music: Pierre Henry, track courtesy of Polygram Markets
Processes: Painting and drawing; step optical printing & re-photography; Arriflex & Bolex cinematography; computer post-production of two separately edited 16mm films, including palette.
A new technology film about bee, honey and keeper. "Documenting the natural evolution of a bee - from larvae to pollinator. Poetically representing orange, blossom honey in the paper-like cells of the hive. A metaphor for creative process." - Ann Arbor Film Festival Notes
1997, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 8.5m, $30
A diptych. Filmically, digitally, texturally, this light painting celebrates four seasons, especially, the coming of spring.
1997, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 8m, $30
Music: Charles Mingus; Voice: Jean Sheperton, track courtesy of Warner Special Products.
Processes: Painting and drawing; step optical printing; computer post-production; 35mm reduction.
The clown is set into motion by two unidentified persons lurking behind it, in the shadows. Oblivious, the clown embarks on its metaphoric life journey. The clown is only successful when a series of calamities bring about is demise, and ultimately, his death.
1998, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 13m, $50
MATERIALS: OIL, CHARCOAL, INK ON PAPER EMULSION*, ON 35MM FILM
Process: Film begins with primitive carving into handmade paper emulsion of ancient cuneiform glyphs, evolves into painting and drawing of glyphs, them floating type, using digital print-out of helvetica type and concludes with multi-material words: World Trade Alphabet.
PLEASE NOTE: NO "LETTRASET" WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS FILM: ALL HELVETICA TYPE AND IT'S FILMIC FLOW WAS DESIGNED, KERNED AND DIGITALLY OFFSET ACETATE BY THE FILMMAKER.
Theme: A Visual Meditation on the evolution of the alphabet which we use, it's origins in ancient Phoenicia, and the fact that it was invented as a shorthand from 360+ character cuneiform to better the efficiency of communication in ancient international world trade. Made at the MacDowell Colony. Purchase, 2001, the Museum of Modern Art Film Archive.
ExhibIted: Gulf & Western Gallery, NYU, NY; Exit Art, The Third World, NYC, NY; Anthology Film Archives; Art Vanguard Gallery, NY.
2001, 16FPS, si, 6m, call for price
Videotape compilations for sale:
Includes: NEWSW, NEW MOON and END
See film descriptions above.
1978-1986, VHS, color/si/so, 25m, $25 Home; $40 Other