Camera: Sandy D'Annunzio; Performers: Lee Vogt, Amy Greenfield; Sound: Optical Synthesizer.
TRANSPORT came out of many influences in the early 1970s: the dead of Vietnam; the poem by my poetry teacher Anne Sexton, "For God While Sleeping"; the post-modern dance experiments with trust, to give yourself totally while being lifted by another; and the airborne astronauts of moon exploration. In the film, a man, then a woman, are lifted from the ground and are carried through space. Most of the film is seen upside-down against the white sky. The man and woman never meet. Their relationship is made entirely through the film editing. They move between ground and sky, between death (dead weight), through gravity (conflict weight) toward space (floating space). Finally, they break out into space and are borne along as if flying through the white air.
Awards: Second Prize, Yale Film Festival; Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum, Austria. Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Film Forum, NY.
1971, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
To the poem "For God While Sleeping" by Anne Sexton. Reader: Anne Sexton;
Performers: Lee Vogt, Amy Greenfield; Camera: Sandy D'Annunzio.
"Based on a poem read by Anne Sexton, this two-minute short is characterized by vertiginous, stylized camerawork. ... Sexton's voice - cool, confident and deliberate - makes a caustic frame for often literal images of a Christ in jeans, clawing at dirt, in a jagged, upside-down crucifixion." - Boston Globe
This is the only film Anne Sexton was involved with and a rare opportunity to hear Sexton read her own poetry to imagery that she was happy with, by one of her closest students. Made in 1972 for the Poetry on Film series, it is now in general distribution for the first time.
I studied poetry with Anne privately in college. It was natural to begin filmmaking to her poetry. When Sexton died, the film was shown on a PBS program on her life. Now, years later, her voice, so immediate and strong on the soundtrack, haunts me.
Exhibition: PBS; Coolidge Corner Cinema; George Eastman House.
1972 (restored 1991), 16mm, color/so, 2.5m, $25
Camera: Hilary Harris; Performer: Amy Greenfield.
ELEMENT, like TIDES, raises issues of the active image of a woman's body on film. The two films are counterparts and are ideally screened together. The woman's body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle which is both birthlike and deathlike and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal area of female sensuality.
"In the well-known ELEMENT, Greenfield rolls and seethes and plunges in a field of mud, her hair, her face, her naked body [are] not just slathered with mud but become a part of it ...." - Deborah Jowitt, dance critic, The Village Voice Exhibition: Toulon Int'l Festival; Whitney Museum of American Art; Third Int'l Avant-Garde Film Festival, London; Film Forum, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY.
1973, 16mm, b&w/si, 11.5m, $35
Camera: Hilary Harris; Performer: Amy Greenfield.
The literary sources for TIDES came from Isadora Duncan's "The Dance of the Future," Maya Deren's script for the unfilmed passages of Ritual In Transfigured Time, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.
"TIDES is a cinema-dance dealing with the theme and image of woman and ocean. The entire film was shot with a high speed camera, creating action from two to twenty times slower than normal speed. Because of this extreme slow motion, the surge and flow of the woman's nude body and the waves becomes intensely felt, continually moving cinematic imagery.
"TIDES alludes to the very romantic confrontation of the human being and the elements as participants in a centuries-old drama. The film is introduced by a quote from Isadora Duncan's 'The Dance of the Future,' and proceeds to visualize the woman - the filmmaker herself - first rolling into the heart of the wave, then moving with, against, under, into the waves, until, at the end of the film, her whole body shouts with joy." - 16th Edinburgh International Film Festival
Exhibition: London Film Festival, 1982; Edinburgh Film Festival, 1982; Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1983; NY Shakespeare Public Theatre, 1983.
1982, 16mm, color/so, 12.5m, $35
A feature film starring Bertram Ross, Janet Eilber and Amy Greenfield. Music: Glenn Branca, Diamanda Galas, Paul Lemos, Elliott Sharp and David Van Tieghem. An "emotionally charged feminist take" (The Village Voice) on the daughter of Oedipus. Amy Greenfield takes avant-garde and feminist filmmaking into a new sphere of storytelling.
"Dazzling, demanding, bold, triumphantly ambitious and successful .... Greenfield wisely decided to shoot her film as a silent, allowing her performers complete freedom of movement. ... Greenfield and her cinematographers Hilary Harris (for the natural locations) and Judy Irola (for the architectural settings) keep the camera in perfect, expressive harmony with the performers. ... Add to this spare, off-screen narration spoken by the various characters as they reveal their innermost thoughts. ... Further add the film's astonishing score, a great, richly varied hum and roar and shimmer. ... Through the flawless fusion of all these elements we're able to experience an 'Antigone' as if we had never seen it performed before, an 'Antigone' at once sensual and erotic, timeless and timely, for this film is charged with the tension of viewing Oedipus from his daughters' point of view. ... Inspired." - Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
Exhibition: Berlin Int'l Film Festival, 1990; Houston Int'l Film Festival, 1990.
Selected as eligible for Academy Award nomination, 1991.
1990, 16mm, color/so, 85m, $250