Sandra Davis came to filmmaking in 1978, influenced by painting and a love of classical and baroque musical forms. Many works center around the body as the site of imagistic and dynamic foundations that structure human impulses, feelings and thoughts. Imagery of natural landscape and architecture reoccur. All the films, as any rhythmic forms, are meant to be understood through the body and senses, as well as the conceptual mind. Editing tactics contrast fluid image and lyrical tempos with jagged, metric rhythms. Contradictory meaning can emerge and traditionally understood meaning can collapse in the parallel streams of images, which pulsate together until one of them takes over.
The films utilize a variety of cinematographic techniques including optical printing, which emphasizes the light-infused and textural qualities of the photographic frame. An interest outside the studio has been her research and curating of film programs tracing the evolution of symbolic imagery in the avant-garde film, focusing on contributions by women. She has created mixed-media installations, including a phallic projection object/screen for a Gulf War performance and "Evident/Evidence (Duchamp Back-Talk)" (1992) an exploration of natural and media landscapes and the Congressional Hill-Thomas hearings. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the NEA, and a Phelan award for filmmaking. Her work has been included in major retrospectives of experimental film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York "Millennium - A 25 Year Retrospective" (1991) and "Manifest" (1992) at the Georges Pompidou Center, Paris; it is represented in national and international collections including that of the Museum of Modern Art, Paris.
"Her film works explode in the mind, leaving openings, impressions, deep fissures and inroads to unseen vision. Her editing is relentless in pursuit of indistinct forms which she somehow renders visible to the inner mind." - Larry Jordan
The first offering in a loose trilogy of films, SOMA deals with patterns of loss, a cycle of memory through past-present-future, with a stasis of polarized energies in conflict, and a hint at their resolution through an increased sensitivity. The search for a personal meaning in experience is repeated on the level of the making of the film, whose language and syntax attempt to approximate the process of the mind ready to give form to experience.
1978, 16mm, color/si, 17m, $50
MATERNAL FILIGREE explores broader patterns of development of the psychic partners in the repeating cycle of sexuality-birth-death. The imagery is more archaic, the memory layer more collective than personal, and the form is more fluid; the interplay is more of dance than of conflict.
"Fighting the conventions of consciousness, Menken, Brakhage and Davis have through the creative act penetrated the so-called conscious mind as well, perhaps, as the so-called subconscious to an area of thought still to be fully explored." - Marilyn Mason
"... MATERNAL FILIGREE is obviously vision rising thru innards ... it trembles like poetry, music - its rhythms OF and-at-one-with the experience itself. You have stitched a meaningful weave of symbolism throughout but always in the sense 'make it new' (as Pound translates the Chinese), so that symbol rubs and clashes with symbol, so that each is always vibrant, so that no symbol could harden midst the frets and stops of your 'music' - that symbols be felt beyond any set-to of understanding ... that none of them be ever anything like pomposity/(the known) but rather always sensual." - Stan Brakhage
Award: First Prize, SF Art Institute Film Festival
1980, 16mm, color/si, 23m, $70
The third part of the trilogy, MATTER OF CLARITY completes this particular cycle of discovery, and brings to resolution these themes, grounded in matter.
"... rich tactile images of the natural world ... convey [the film's] Blakean revelation of the sensuality of perception and the perception of sensuality." - Ian Christie
Award: SF Art Institute Film Festival
1981-1985, 16mm, color/so, 30m, $90
My own films usually begin with a question, and frequently lead into unexpected territory. MATERNAL FILIGREE began as an exploration of life in the female body, and led me astray. The film finally led me back to the original question. I thought MATTER OF CLARITY would be a nice, sensual journey through that attraction-of-opposites energy. However, it quickly ran out of control, and I had to struggle to rein it in. In AN ARCHITECTURE OF DESIRE, the manifestations of desire, and the opportunities for a clarity of observation, presented themselves during the filming in unforeseen ways. Like all rhythmic structures, the film is meant to be understood through the body and senses, as well as through the conceptual mind.
"Davis's earlier explorations of the body and sensuality come to fruition in this, her latest film. Through rigorous cross-cutting and use of extreme close-ups, manmade and natural manifestations of architecture merge with the physical body into palpable delineations of form and function." - San Francisco Cinematheque program notes
1988, 16mm, color/si, 15m, $45
Three women telling their own stories in a non-narrative, non-documentary form. How do inner conflicts of intimacy, sexual need, and violent impulses emerge in personal relationships? The evidence includes testimonies describing experiences of sexuality, love relationships, births, illegal abortions, adolescence as a Jew in revolutionary Russia and in the Protestant US Midwest. Private anecdotes illuminate societal realities of race, culture and gender. My "story" contributed contradictory images: the archaic Florida swamp, the elegant forms of European medieval architecture, Congress and Anita Hill, the mermaids of Weekie Wachee, victim heroines of European opera, abstract color and light explorations. Bits of 1950s educational films testify to scientific belief in cause and effect and stupefying patriarchal convictions of "how to" grow up well, avoid "going bad" and get a date for the prom.
1989-1999, 16mm, color/so, 53m, $135
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The following three films were conceived of as postcards to myself and songs to the passion of place. They emerged as little stories without narratives and recollections of a French appreciation of American jazz. Cinematography concentrates on the spectacular natural light of the places: the films were shot with no special filters, particular technical effects, or optical printing. The films can be rented separately, or as a package of three.
The specific colors and tones and rhythms of a place in the south of France. The dryness of gold, the rock of plateau, the cemetery of the sailors, the echoes of fishermen and artists, the memory of Paul Valery. And water everywhere.
1991-1999, 16mm, color/so, 6.5m, $30
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The colors and breezes of the countryside and house in Normandy. The blue crockery, the yellow lichen, and where the key in the monastery kitchen leads.
1992-1999, 16mm, color/so, 2.5m, $20
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Some particular spaces, inhabited awhile ago. Looking back into the Parisian courtyard, looking at the ladies at the villa, looking into the secrets of the chapel of the delinquents. Light sculpts space; shadow describes form.
1992-1999, 16mm, color/so, 9.5m, $30
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Note: The above three films can be rented as a package for $69.
My brother was disabled by muscular dystrophy and used a wheelchair for most of his life. Despite the long, gradual degeneration of his physical condition, he lived with great spirit and heart, married, raised two children, volunteered for his church and was still working at his profession and building his fish pond on his land, when he died suddenly of complications of MD at age 52. In an irony of life, a little Christmas message from him arrived two days after his sudden death. This event impelled me to respond with a film. The chair was his mobility in life; the pond he created was his dream. He was my only brother and when I myself was disabled 10 years ago in an auto accident, his attitude of practical adaptations to physical impairments was one that made it easier for me. This film is a little elegy song to him, simultaneously celebrating his life and mourning his family’s personal loss.
2001, 16mm color/s, 6.5m, $25
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A true story – and the aesthetic sequelae of the filmmaker’s recovery process following a 1993 auto accident. Parallel voices of narrativized testimony describing a woman’s struggle to heal within the American medical system, and a personal rumination on the journey through a sudden rupture of health into disability. Feeling my brain in the act of consciousness in viewing the MRI cells, images from art history, personal history and fantasy exploded. As did the elements of the soundtrack.
Filmed entirely on the animation stand.
2006, 16mm, color/so, 30m, $75
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