Alexis Krasilovsky’s most recent film is Women Behind the Camera, a global feature (shot in China, France, India, Iran, Japan, Mexico, the US and other countries) based on her book Women Behind the Camera (Praeger, 1997), the first in-depth look at the lives of camerawomen and their struggles to succeed in a male-dominated field.
After studying film history at Yale University, Alexis Krasilovsky embarked on a career as an independent filmmaker and holographer. Krasilovsky was the first to include the film techniques of zooming and dissolving in a motion picture hologram, Created and Consumed by Light (1975). Her pro-choice hologram, Childbirth Dream, was exhibited at the Georges Pompidou Center, Paris and other museums and festivals here and abroad. She later received an MFA in Film/Video Graphics from California Institute of the Arts. As head of her own production company, Krasilovsky has written, directed, produced and shot numerous documentaries, video-poems and art films, including End of the Art World, Exile, What Memphis Needs and Blood.
Alexis Krasilovsky is currently a professor in the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University Northridge, teaching film production, screenwriting and film studies as well as continuing to make her own movies.
Alexis Krasilovsky’s website: www.womenbehindthecamera.com
With Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Michael Snow.
"With a quality of humor possible only with depth of understanding, Alexis Krasilovsky presents a catalogue of interviews with modern artists in which the shooting style as well as the aural material's format rehearses the personal style, the aesthetics, and the assumption of each artist about the nature of his art." - Joan Braderman, Artforum
"The interviews with the individual artists vary from gala opening with Warhol's superstars at the Whitney Museum ... to the creation of actual art work in the studios of Rauschenberg and Snow." - Howard Guttenplan, Millennium Film Journal
"With ferocious wit, Ms. Krasilovsky sends up New York's art scene in END OF THE ART WORLD. In essence, Ms. Krasilovsky uses the sounds and images of the usual art documentary to create her own work of art." - Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
1971, 16mm, color/so, 35m, $100
Signed DVD Sale: $75, home use; $225, institutions
A feminist film about cows made in the heart of America's conservative dairyland. "
Funny" - Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
"There are a couple of cows in 18th century landscapes. In the 19th century, when representational painting was still the only kind of art, only men were allowed to study nudes. Finally an American named Thomas Eakins opened an art school where women were allowed to study them too. Only women weren't allowed to study human nudes, they only allowed cow nudes." - from the soundtrack
1972, 16mm, hand-painted color/so, 3m, $20
For lovers unaware of love ....
"A kind of pastoral fantasy." - The Los Angeles Times
1972, 16mm, color/so, 3m (not available separately)
An erotic study in texture.
1973, 16mm, b&w/color/si, 3m (not available separately)
An homage to the haunting, feminist poet who struggles to remember lines from Charlotte Perkins Stetson, John Keats and poems of her own, as she goes blind and deaf. A brilliant intellectual, filmed over the course of a year and a half, May Gruening loses touch with the very core of her life.
1973, 16mm, color/so, 4m (not available separately)
Charlie's Dream
Charlie Dozes Off & The Dog Bothers Him
La Belle Dame San Merci
1972-1973, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 10m, $30
GUERRILLA COMMERCIAL protests discrimination faced by women filmmakers during the '70s. Programmed without preview at the Whitney Museum, in a women's film festival entirely run by men, GUERRILLA COMMERCIAL is the film the Whitney wanted to burn.
1973, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $20
Starring Larry Fine, Abbie Herrick, Evan McHale, Mark Lyon and Annie Sharkiss.
A funny, bitter look at middle-class youth trying to be tough in the trappings of pornography, drugs and quick money. A film about desperation in the New York streets.
"In its stream-of-consciousness way, BLOOD (1975) evokes Manhattan street life even more powerfully than Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver. Ms. Krasilovsky brings into camera an array of furtive, frustrated people - e.g., hookers and juvenile delinquents - and allows them to talk about themselves as we watch them in action. As a depiction of contemporary urban despair, BLOOD, more specifically, is an angry, outraged protest of the exploitation of women by men. Indeed, this 21-minute film is punctuated by shots of the covers of lurid paperbacks featuring bondage and framed by an embittered theme song, 'Women in Chains.'" - Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
1975, 16mm, color/so, 21m, $60
A filmed poem for women driven to the ground by love, COMMISERATION MOON stars the founder of Women & Film, Siew Hwa Beh.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
Starring Mose Vinson, Memphis Slim and Ma Rainey II. Produced by Ann Rickey. Directed by Alexis Krasilovsky.
"A straightforward look at blues pianist Mose Vinson - the interviews from his boyhood home in Mississippi intercut with the man at his piano, singing in his soulful wail, which is where he really shines." - LA Weekly
"'We called him Mr. Boogie Woogie,' Memphis Slim explains, in his affectionate tribute to his less successful colleague .... Vinson's Holly Springs boyhood as the son of a Saturday Night musician, his failure as a sharecropper, his involvement with the Baptist church, his lonely life now ... all are captured with striking visuals .... The intimacy that the small-format video medium can provide is displayed here to its fullest extent. ... Vinson's world is beautiful, troubled, and important." - Film Library Quarterly
1978, DVD (signed), color/so, 30m, $50 Home; $150 Institutions
Co-directed by Alexis Krasilovsky, Ann Rickey and Walter Baldwin.
Beale Street is where W.C. Handy wrote the blues, where Boss Crump abused his power, and where Martin Luther King marched days before his death in 1968. In the making of our oral history, we went to the Beale Streeters who knew and loved it best, including B.B. King, the Hooks Brothers, Bobby Blue Bland, Prince Gabe, Maurice "Fess" Hulbert and Rufus Thomas, and we included rare footage of King's march.
"The memories that we have - we older ones that's been around - the contributions that, you know, have gone out to the world from this place - they sure shouldn't be left to die." - B.B. King
1981, DVD (signed), b&w/so, 28m, $50 Home; $150 Institutions
An environmental love story. A fisherman and his wife and the Mississippi River wildlife they love are pitted between the construction of a drag race track and a raging chemical fire. Eleanor and Will Roberge call this precarious spot of beauty on the edge of Memphis' industrial ruins "Innisfree."
"The heavies of the film are chemical plant smokestacks, beer cans and the dump fires that send animals and residents scurrying for safety." - The Commercial Appeal
1982, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $20
"EXILE portrays the filmmaker's own compelling journey behind the Iron Curtain to retrace her origins. Beautiful scenery and often haunting music accompanied her sojourn from Czechoslovakia into Prague and Austria where the film captures what it meant to be Jewish and survive during those dark Hitler years." - Josh Baran
"Remarkable." - Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
"Such films do more than increase East-West understanding and reduce tensions; they also serve to emphasize that we are all essentially one people." - Barbra Streisand
"Watching it, we can realize how at times we have felt both blessed and cursed by the fate that caused our parents and grandparents to leave their homelands and settle in America, the fate which enables most of us to be alive today." - The Jewish Journal
1984, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $90
Signed DVD Sale: $65 Home; $195 Institutions
Contrasting the black and white cultures of Memphis, Tennessee, WHAT MEMPHIS NEEDS is based on a poem written in the Free People's Poetry Workshop of the internationally renowned "prison poet" Etheridge Knight. From ponies running through the Memphis cottonwoods to a girl running across the construction site of Mud Island, from white kids in a West Memphis parade throwing candy at black bystanders to a Bible reading in the Lorraine Motel, and from rock 'n' rollers to marquee lights on Beale Street, WHAT MEMPHIS NEEDS provides a searing cross-section of Memphis history and society. Featuring the Harmonikeys and Roosevelt Briggs.
Categories of interest: Black Studies, Urban Studies, Poetry, Women's Studies, Civil Rights, Harmonica, Blues, the American South.
Exhibition: Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour; The '90s, PBS; Anthology Film Archives; Louisville Int'l Film & Video Festival.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
A first-hand account about healing from natural disaster, EPICENTER U. is also a multi-cultural portrait of a university which suffered $350 million in damages.
"From gripping testimonials to comic relief, the new film EPICENTER U. chronicles the impact of the Northridge Earthquake on the people of California State University, Northridge." - Daily News
"I have never been in a earthquake. While watching the film I really felt, for the first time, the costs to both the individual and the community of such a disaster. ... Drawing on her own original filmmaking style developed over years of notable filmmaking, she uses a collage of techniques (cinema verité, direct camera address interviews, slow motion, essayist documentary, poetry) to explore the film's complex and elusive subject matter. More importantly, perhaps, is her collaboration with her students. She gives them a real voice." - Dr. Michelle Citron, Radio-TV-Film Dept., Northwestern University
1995, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $90
Signed DVD Sale: $65 Home; $195 Institutions
Winner: BEST OF THE FEST Literary Award, 2008 Austin Woman's Film, Music and Literary Festival
Some Women Writers Kill Themselves: Selected Videopoems and Poems of Alexis Krasilovsky (Rafael Film, 2008) is a DVD that allows the viewer to navigate between the videopoems and between poems of several illustrated collections. The DVD's videopoems include What Memphis Needs, screened in the Museum of Modern Art's "Between Word and Image"; Exile, aired nationally on PBS, and Inside Story, an ode to a cervix -- the first experimental film using endoscopic camerawork. Also included are three previously published chapbooks of poetry (Some Women Writers Kill Themselves, Some Men, and Abuse of Privacy), and Self-Portrait as a Geisha, a collection of new poems.
2007, digital video, color/b&w/so, 35m
Signed DVD Sale: $75 Home, $225 Institutions