The dance of Carolyn Chave Kaplan; Music from Stockhausen's "Hymnen" and "Mantra," Enesco's "Sonata No. 3 in A Minor."
Images of a woman in dance, in flora, in picture, in eyes, in architecture, in sunshine, in color, in crystal, in space, in confusion, in danger, in disintegration, in her hand, in birth, in the Valley of Sorrow, in the sea, in repetition, in sculpture and in herself.
"Some really extraordinary subliminal combinations are happenings." - Pat O'Neill
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Ann Arbor S8mm Festival; Atlanta, Athens film festivals, Georgia; Athens Int'l Film Festival, Ohio; Cannes Amateur; Humboldt Film Festival; Refocus/Womanview; Washington National Student Film Festival.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 7.5m, $20
Voice: Marille Hahne; Boy: Nimbus Couzin.
DEUTSCHLAND SPIEGEL is a film of light, shadow, air, stone, fences, soldiers, roads. And words. Footage from old German newsreels and parallel personal footage is edited and optically printed into counterpoint with images of a young boy. The loss of innocence is the boy's, the burden of understanding is ours. (Warning: contains proofs that things close in upon us without our noticing.)
1980, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $35
A house of trick cards, the woman as house.
"A marvelous smorgasbord of images." - Edgar Daniels
"Architectural structures become the structures of relationships, establishing the windows of communication (between parents and children, between lovers) while preserving a sense of enclosure, isolation." - Dave Kehr
Award: First Prize (Experimental), Athens Int'l Film Festival, Ohio, 1978
1977/1981, 16mm, color/so, 24.5m, $75
Girl: Gradiva Couzin
This film "plays" with language and history in a naive way, weaving, in the words of a child, a disappearing landscape into the fabric of a film of numbers, sounds, and textures. "There's a paradox at the center of Couzin's work, in that for all of the wariness of form and order her films express, they remain tightly organized, elegant formal studies. ... SALVE is her most paradoxical film and, I think, her richest. A young girl's discovery of 'the relationships between the quantities' - of geometry, volume, time, and numbers - is seen as an ineffably tragic development." - Dave Kehr
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival.
1981, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $45
ODILONODILON is a portrait of an adolescent boy coming to know himself and his place within his family and society. It uses historic sound: Edward R. Murrow's Christmas Eve broadcast during World War II to the parents of the young children of London's families, urging them to send their youngest to the country to save their lives as a protection against the nightly bombing raids. The "Yanks in December" recording is ironically echoed in the baseball motif in the film. Odilon's love of baseball, eating and cooking and his growing awareness of adulthood's responsibility, ambition and judgement create a brooding tension. Playfulness and intellectual rigor struggle to remain part and parcel of his daily life against the larger backdrops of Alcatraz and World War II.
Award: SF Art Institute Film Festival
Exhibition: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Philadelphia College of Art; Rochester Institute of Technology; Ithaca College; NYU, Syracuse; Pacific Film Archive; Image Forum; Tokyo Museum of Modern Art; Kyoto; American Centers in Fukuoka, Osaka, Nagoya; SF Cinematheque.
1984, 16mm, b&w/so, 21m, $60
Pauline is a film that explores the friendship of two artists, obliquely, through the exploration of a house, a garden and a painting. The qualities of light and time are used to heighten the properties simple acts and objects may take on when mediated by these two elements. The primary subject of the film, then, is not an event, nor a story, but a sense of an artist's process and her relation to the world.
"Through the use of a hand-held camera, Couzin takes us with her on a search for Pauline, a woman who had been her closest childhood friend. We travel through a labyrinth of extraordinary images which capture Pauline's world .... It is not Pauline's likeness we are looking for - we see her image many times in the film - but rather the elusive essence of who this childhood friend has grown up to be. ... But as Couzin searches through Pauline's world for this essence, we sense that she is also searching for another elusive presence; that is, the person she might have become." - Hollie Lavenstein
Exhibition: Millennium, NY; SF Art Institute Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Walker Art Center; Chicago Frankfurt Exchange; SF Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive; Philadelphia College of Art; Ithaca College; RIT; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Big Muddy Film Festival; Image Forum; Tokyo Museum of Modern Art; Kyoto; American Centers in Fukuoka, Osaka.
1985, 16mm, b&w/so, 22m, $65
"The lush and mysterious realm evoked by SHELLS AND RUSHES recalls the uncanny eclecticism of the surrealists. Strange, flesh-like sea shells, restlessly turning and quivering; enigmatic allusions to classical mythology, such as the Birth of Venus and Leda and the Swan; and paradoxical uses of positive and negative space variously bring to mind Man Ray, Dali and Cornell. But Couzin's film creates its own rich, secretive world and provides its own astonishing pleasures. Accompanied by an otherworldly soundtrack of ancient throat-singing, this deftly edited film is by turns seductive, humorous and serene." - Rafael Wang
"Two simultaneous trips: one around summertime Alaska where the grasses are trying to grow and the children are allowed to point; the other upon the artist's magic table. Here nature is frozen into a pretty marble chessboard with slate backside. Here culture and imagination, seashell sexuality, bits of string, oceans of dyed silica gel dewing petally ladies, twittery families of seashells, seashell logic and perspective, Madonna ... romp supreme. Deep gutteral Eskimo chants. You're in the land where Beauty lives and dies. No, you're back in summertime AL. sorry AK." - Dennis Couzin
Awards: Black Maria Film and Video Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival; Humboldt State Film Festival; Athens Int'l Film Festival.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Montreal "Main Film"; Toronto Experimental Film Congress; Ann Arbor S8mm Festival; Big Muddy Film Festival; RIT; NYU, Syracuse; Ithaca College; Image Forum, Tokyo; Tokyo Museum of Modern Art; Kyoto; American Centers in Fukuoka, Osaka, Nagoya.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 13.3m, $40
"Focusing on the confident and sensuous movement/"dance"/embodiment of performance artist Lynn Book - and energetically bypassing the strictures of everyday language as well as the demands of narrative - BOUQUET unleashes the visceral force of often-repressed joys. Filmmaker Sharon Couzin and performance artist Lynn Book co-perform the galvanizing sound of BOUQUET. We are invited to experience two women's voices in a marvelous cascade of prelinguistic utterances, laughter of every conceivable joyful "color," evocative breathing and moans unleashed and released in order to close off the need for everyday language. It is as if some pre-Socratic mystery cult materialized by the waterfall, by the garden and in the artist's studio. Yet Couzin's film also amplifies primary energies with modern, subversive and ever-so-sly wit. Dynamic montage and joyful camera movement secure BOUQUET's place as a visionary film that invites the attention of critics and fellow artists alike." - Zack Stiglicz
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago; RIT; Ithaca College; NYU, Syracuse; Image Forum, Tokyo; Tokyo Museum of Modern Art; Kyoto; American Centers in Fukuoka, Osaka, Nagoya.
1988, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
GRADIVA was shot over a period of five summers and weaves a complex set of themes. Based loosely on the Wilhelm Jensen story, "Gradiva," used by Freud in Delusion and Dream to describe the relation of delusion to dream and both to fetishes, GRADIVA is a portrait of a thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old adolescent girl. The word gradiva is Latin, and roughly translates as "one who walks forward most lightly." The film uses several themes, among them, the role of dolls and fetishized objects (especially rocks, bones, sticks, flowers and other natural forms). Lynn Book and E.J. Sims, two Chicago-based performance artists, provide another main thread, through their mainly non-verbal involvement with objects. Lynn performs on the soundtrack with two other voices in Andrew Latties' arrangement of a Kurt Schwitters piece, "The UrSonata," a piece in the nonsense tradition of Lewis Carroll. Gradiva, through the voiceover, describes her view of her life, but is shaped into a work of art through her mother's poetic transformation. After climbing into the giant white dress (the virgin-maiden-mother dress), Gradiva is free to leap aesthetically to an image she creates herself.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology; NYU, Syracuse; Ithaca College; Image Forum in Tokyo.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75