Marjorie Keller (1950-1994) wrote: “The current art of the film deranges its predecessors…It is in the work of women filmmakers of the avant-garde that the old forms are seen as if through an anamorphic lens.” Her films honor and challenge the traditions that she assumed when she learned filmmaking from Saul Levine, Sidney Peterson, and Stan Brakhage. Keller consistently explored the political implications of daily living and personal pleasures in her twenty films.
A young dancer rechoreographed through film editing. This film was originally made in standard 8mm, from a home movie.
1973, 16mm, color/si, 3m, $20
Begun as a document for insurance purposes, OBJECTION catalogues the contents of a house with ever-increasing horror. The soundtrack carries the voices and sounds of the family unseen.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $85
This film puts together a perspective on the unhappy experience of traveling in cars - an activity aimless and unmemorable. The splicer makes a new trip of the footage, limited not to the represented geography but to the after-effect on the mind and heart of the first trip.
1976, 8mm, color/si, 7m, $20
"MISCONCEPTION is a film structured on juxtapositions: indoors/outdoors; redecoration/destruction; exercises/actual birth; male opinion/female opinion; preparation/pain. Its montage structure of both image and sound balances MISCONCEPTION on the precarious moment, like birth, between these counterposed positions: conception/misconception, point/counterpoint." - Anne Friedberg
"MISCONCEPTION is composed of six parts that together chronicle the experience of one woman and her husband during the course of her natural childbirth. The film communicates the precision and care with which it has been assembled. (The) structure lends the film a pacing rhythm that has less to do with traditional cinema-verité documentary or film journalism than with the pacing and rhythm of poetry." - B. Ruby Rich
1977, 16mm, color/so, 42m, $130
VHS Sale: $100 Home; $200 Other
In THE WEB I delved for the first and only time into film as mischief-making; wicked, like a child.
1977, 8mm, color/si, 10m, $30
The first two in a series of in-camera edited films. ANCIENT PARTS portrays the symbolic differentiation and mock conquest of a boy and his mother.
... I watched the boy play Narcissus and Oedipus in three minutes. The small camera, the fact that we had all lived together for so long (during the shooting of MISCONCEPTION), the rich golden grain of the film all provide the privilege of intimacy. FOREIGN PARTS portrays the poetics of family life in an unfamiliar context. FOREIGN PARTS is a single camera roll. Many people go home to foreign parts: a few familiar faces in a strange landscape. In such circumstances the ordinary is the most precious, given a slight shift of being in its new context. All we can glean from the experiences are a few new memories built on old images. Using a camera at such times is refined work; raw intuition works better than careful planning.
1979, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $20
A pan and a dissolve make a window of a wall on film. A portrait of the filmmaker in a luminous space, synthetically rendered via positive and negative overlays.
... I lived in some rooms by the sea and watched the inside and the view as well as the window panes that divided and joined them. I was often lost in thought. The birds would come and make a racket, reminding me I shared that space and sky with them. The film is a moody record of that place and my peace of mind.
1979, 16mm, color/si, 7m, $20
"The film deals simultaneously with girls becoming women, woman looking back on her childhood. It is pervaded with voluptuousness, with longing: the woman, disappointed in love, looking for lost innocence, the girl yearning for the power of her sex." - Anne Becker
1980, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
VHS Sale: $75 Home; $200 Other
An elegy for a Newfoundland dog named Melville and a portrait of his owner.
1983, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 9m, $25
VHS Sale: $35 Home; $80 Other
Three songs between heaven and earth. With Carmen, Susan, Joseph and Marcus Vigil.
1983, S8mm, color/so, 9m, $27
Owing to Virgil's Georgics. With assistance from Hollis Melton and Helene Kaplan. Music: Charles Ives, "Sonata for Violin and Piano #4 (Children's Day at the Camp Meeting)" and "Ambrosian Chant (Capella Musicale del Duomo di Milano)." Filmed in Yorktown Heights, New York; St. Remy en Provence, France; Mantua, Rome and Brindisi, Italy; and in Arcadia and the island of Kea in Greece.
Georgic I - The annual produce first seen in spring - The furrowed earth ready for planting - The distribution, support and protection of young plants - The implements of the garden.
Georgic II - The life of Virgil is recapitulated in summer, with a digression on the sacred - The sheep of Arcadia - The handling of bees - The pagan Lion of Kea. Georgic III - The skill and industry of the old man in autumn - Ancient custom and modern method - The use of implements of the garden.
Georgic IV - The compost is prepared at season's end - The filmmaker completes THE ANSWERING FURROW with the inclusion of her own image. Note on the music: The music works with the image to parallel the trace of history. Ives recalls Protestant hymns, which recall the origin of the hymn in 12th century Milanese music, which allows for that music closest (in my experience of making this film) to the hum of bees and of amplifiers, the Orthodox Greek chant.
1985, 16mm, color/so, 27m, $90
VHS Sale: $80 Home; $150 Other
"If you put it on tape, you can't erase it." HEREIN charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman's autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side in New York, street prostitution and drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space and history.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 35m, $105
See film descriptions above.
DVD sale: $100 for Home use and Institutional use
See film descriptions above.
DVD sale: $100 for Home use and Institutional use
DVD Volumes 1 & 2 together, sale price: $150