Still making films after all of these years, (35). Four more are being edited now and should be finished in a couple of years.
I hope that my work stands alone without an introduction. If you want to know more about me and my work, write to me in care of Canyon and I'll answer any questions you might have. Otherwise I have nothing of importance to say.
Meanwhile, I've put a picture of myself in the catalogue for the first time. Take a peek at this mug and understand you are looking into the eyes of a person who believes that after day comes night and after that, day comes again.
Love to all,
Chick Strand
Note: Film prints of all the films listed below are available for sale. Please inquire for prices.
An experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions. Techniques include live action, animation, montage and found images.
Exhibition: New York Film Festival; Arles, France Film Festival; Canadian Women's Film Festival.
1966, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
With Anselmo Aguascalientes and Balsamo the Magician. Music by La Banda Aguascalientes. An experimental documentary in the sense that it is a symbolic reenactment of a real event. I asked a Mexican Indian friend what he would like most in the world. His answer was, "A double E flat tuba." I thought it would be easy to find one at the Goodwill very cheap. This wasn't so, but a sympathetic man in a music store found a cheap but beautiful brass wrap-around tuba. I bought it, smuggled it into Mexico and gave it to my friend in the desert. The film is a poetic interpretation of this event in celebration of wishes and tubas.
Exhibition: Women in Film, Whitney Museum of American Art; Cannes Int'l Film Festival.
1967, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
A film poem using found film and stock footage altered by printing, home development and solarization. It is a film using visual relationships to invoke a feeling of flow and movement. Japanese Koto music.
Exhibition: Smithsonian Institute; Women in Film, SUNY Buffalo; American Film Institute.
1967, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
An expressive documentary about women in the Third World. This is an ethnographic film about two cultures that have encountered one another. The Spanish Franciscan Missionaries went to Venezuela in 1945 to "civilize" the Warao Indians, who live in the swamps on the Orinoco River Delta. Before the missionaries came, the Waraos lived in relative isolation and were little affected by the outside world. The relationship between the Indians and the missionaries is simple on the surface, but it is manifested in a complex change of techniques, values and life style which have indelibly altered the Warao vision of life.
The acculturation is presented from two viewpoints. A nun tells how the Indians lived when the missionaries arrived and what the nuns have done to "improve" conditions, both spiritually and materially. An old Warao Indian woman tells what she feels has been the important experiences in her life. The two viewpoints are structured in counterpoint so that the deeper aspects of the juxtaposition of the modern culture over the old becomes apparent through the revelations of the two women.
Exhibition: SF Int'l Film Festival; Robert Flaherty Film Seminar; American Anthropology Meetings, NY; Women's Film Festival, NY.
1970, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
Expressive documentary in an ethnographic approach about Anselmo, a Mexican Indian. It is a film about his struggle for survival in the Third World. Orphaned at age 7, he was the sole support of himself and his baby sister, who eventually starved and died in his arms. The film continues with Anselmo's struggle to live and to do something with his life other than a docile acceptance of poverty. Totally uneducated in a formal way, he taught himself how to play a horn and when he became a man he started his own street band. The film was started in 1965 and finished in 1975. During the 10 years, I saw the physical change in Anselmo's life in terms of things he could buy to make his family at first able to survive, and during the last years, to make them more comfortable. I felt a change in his spirit from a proud, individualistic and graceful man into one obsessed with possessions and role playing in order to get ahead and stay on top, but one cannot help but admire his energy and determination to succeed, to drag himself and is family out of the hopelessness and sameness of poverty to give them a future. Anselmo tells his own story in English although he does not speak the language. After he told me of his life in Spanish, I translated it into English and taught him how to say it.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75
Impressionistic surrealism in three acts. The approach is literary experimental with optical effects. There are three mental states that are interesting: amnesia, euphoria and ecstasy. Amnesia is not knowing who you are and wanting desperately to know. I call this the White Night. Euphoria is not knowing who you are and not caring. This is the Dream of Meditation. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who you are and still not caring. I call this the Memory of the Future.
This is an autobiographical film funded by the American Film Institute.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75
Poetic surrealism. Approach is experimental in relationship of image and sound. A film about the loss of innocence and the search for the essence of the human spirit. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
A kind of heretic fantasy film. An expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American woman. Not a personal portrait so much as an evocation of the consciousness of women in rural parts of such countries as Spain, Greece and Mexico; women who wear black from the age 15 and spend their entire lives giving birth, preparing food and tending to household and farm responsibilities. MUJER DE MILFUEGOS depicts in poetic, almost abstract terms, their daily repetitive tasks as a form of obsessive ritual.
The film uses dramatic action to express the thoughts and feelings of a woman living within this culture. As she becomes transformed, her isolation and desire, conveyed in symbolic activities, endows her with a universal quality. Through experiences of ecstasy and madness we are shown different aspects of the human personality. The final sequence presents her awareness of another level of knowledge.
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Sinking Creek Film Festival.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; New York Women's Film Festival; Filmex, LA.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
"Chick Strand is a prolific and prodigiously gifted film artist who seems to break new ground with each new work. Her recent "found footage" works such as CARTOON LE MOUSSE, are extraordinarily beautiful, moving, visionary pieces that push this genre into previously unexplored territory. If poetry is the art of making evocative connections between otherwise dissimilar phenomena, then Chick Strand is a great poet, for these films transcend their material to create a surreal and sublime universe beyond reason." - Gene Youngblood
1979, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
A wet hot dream about sensuality.
1979, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m, $21
Dedicated to the memory of Anne Frank, and the tenacity of the human spirit.
1979, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m, $21
1979, 16mm, b&w/so, 25m, $75
"Chick Strand's SOFT FICTION is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. The title SOFT FICTION works on several levels. It evokes the soft line between truth and fiction that characterizes Strand's own approach to documentary, and suggests the idea of softcore fiction, which is appropriate to the film's erotic content and style. It's rare to find an erotic film with a female perspective dominating both the narrative discourse and the visual and audio rhythms with which the film is structured. Strand continues to celebrate in her brilliant, innovative personal documentaries her theme, the reaffirmation of the tough resilience of the human spirit." - Marsha Kinder, Film Quarterly
1979, 16mm, b&w/so, 54m, $140
Continuing the life of Anselmo, a Mexican street musician, and his life-long struggle to make a good life for his children. This film focuses on his relationship with his wife Adela and his mistress, Cruz, and theirs with him. In a society where traditional gender roles are separate and sharply defined, the number of children defines male identity and keeps the women at home and dependent. Poverty makes daily survival a desperate struggle. Both men and women must cooperate, the men to provide food and shelter and the women to raise and care for the large family. However, the cooperation is often superficial, with very little communication in terms of inner emotional needs. Relationships become economic in essence in which both men and women perceive themselves living in an emotional desert. The film is about lives in conflict from three points of view as told by the people involved. It explores the division between the real and ideal.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 35m, $105
Aztec romance and the dream of love. The anthropologist's most human desire, the ultimate contact with the informant. The denial of intellectualism and the acceptance of the romantic heart, and a soul without innocence.
There is a boy,
Who lives across the river.
Alas, I cannot swim,
I cannot swim.
- Sappho, 600 BC
1986, 16mm, color/so, 12.5m, $40
A collage film made from Third World images and found sound from a 1940s radio show ("I Love a Mystery"), live recordings of an operation on a horse, and a 1970s church service, all taken out of context and reconstructed into new relationships and meanings. An Anglo woman's interpretation of magic realism.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 9.5m, $30
A "new narrative" film based on the visions of magic realism in an Anglo context. This is a gothic mystery that explores a reckless pursuit of interchangeable personalities and experience. Whether experience is first hand, read, remembered from a conversation during a chance encounter, heard of from all possible sources of information, whether fact or fiction, the "experiences" become ours; reinterpreted, reconstructed, and restructured, finally becoming our personal myths, and the source of our poetry and dreams. The sources for this film include night dreams, the idea of holocaust, the exoticness of the Mid-East, the sensuality of animals, the explorations of Scott in Antarctica, and a film I once saw, entitled The Son of Amir Is Dead.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 26.5m, $80
Intimate documentary about young women who make papier mache fruit and vegetables in a small factory in Mexico. They have a gringo boss, but the factory is owned by his Mexican wife. The focus of the film is on the color, music and movement involved, and the gossip which goes on constantly, revealing what the young women think about men.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 22m, $66