Nina Danino
1955 (71 год)She made 16mm experimental films in the ambit of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. Her films 1981-1987 combined elliptical and observational narrative to inscribe and defer the representation of the woman. Her films 1990-1997 mix religious iconography with psychoanalysis as a discourse and the use of performative voice and song. Stabat Mater (1990) is considered a seminal film of the British avant-garde. Her films “lead us on journeys through altered states, religious experiences and emotional landscapes,sometimes to the edge of the representable” (Helen De Witt). In her film soundtracks she has collaborated with singers including New York experimental vocalist Shelley Hirsch in “Now I am yours” (1993) with Tuvan vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak and English soprano Catherine Bott in the landscape feature film Temenos (1997).
Her work also returns to the ephemeral aspects of place and the Mediterranean geography. Meteorologies (2013) is a small book and audio work about weather and the memory of a disappeared place.
Her recent works 2010-2016 are Communion (2010), a silent film portrait, shot on 35mm, black and white photographed by Billy Williams BSC. Jennifer (2015) is a feature-length documentary of an enclosed Carmelite nun in Spain and Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara (2015-16) is single-channel video, 6-channel sound installation and a silent 16mm film made in collaboration with the enclosed monastic community of Sorelle Povere in Italy.
Her films have been broadcast and screened at cinemas, festivals and museums worldwide. Visionary Landscapes, is an illustrated volume on her work by Black Dog Publishing (2005). “..and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens” is an essay on place and her films published by Mousse Publishing (2013). Her body of work is in the collection of the British Film Institute National Film Archive.
Nina Danino has taken part in many conferences and talks on experimental film. She was a member of the editorial collective of the journal Undercut (1982-1998) and is Co-editor of the Undercut Reader (2002). Her current research is in women’s experimental narrative film and on the material practices and the context of women’s experimental narrative film at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op.
Nina Danino lives and works in London. She is Reader in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Temenos
Nina Danino
Temenos means a sacred site or ritual precinct. Temenos, the film, explores the phenomenon of visionary experiences. In the film we see locations where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared, including Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje in Bosnia & Herzegovina where the visions continue. Nina Danino films the landscapes that have witnessed these transcendental appearances, imbuing them with a sense of the sacred.
Temenos
Close to Home
Nina Danino
Nina Danino
Gibraltar as a real place – and an imagined geography and history. In the first part, the camera travels around West Berlin picking out touristic monuments and describing them in terms of their significance to military history… In the second half (in which the commentary also charts the escalation of land frontier sea and air restrictions), a ferry leaves a quayside and sails into the open Strait. It is an image of freedom but also a melancholy image of parting.
Close to Home
"Now I Am Yours"
Nina Danino
Nina Danino
A film on Saint Teresa that leads us through an unnervingly authentic extreme state of religious and sexual ecstasy. With the central image of the statue of Saint Teresa of Avila in Rome, together with glimpses of colour-saturated flower gardens, the Crucifixion and Baroque plasterwork, we listen to the gulping and frenetically clipped voice of the ‘saint’ pouring out her rapturous lament, attempting to express the unsayable. The film’s soundtrack combines a spoken voice by Nina Danino and performed vocals by New York experimental singer Shelley Hirsch.
"Now I Am Yours"
Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara
Nina Danino
A 16mm portrait in response to the idea of simplicity and poverty which is the guiding principle of the Poor Clares and their ‘hidden’ life. Filmed in the enclosed Monastero di Santa Chiara, San Marino. The nuns spend the morning in the ‘laboratorio’ sewing, mending, ironing, in the kitchen preparing the midday meal and in the garden, tending to the animals and cultivation.
Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara
Stabat Mater
Nina Danino
Stabat Mater opens and closes with two sung laments, then launches into a breathless torrent of words and phrases, a re-reading of the eternal feminine of Joyce’s Ulysses, which echoes the exultant/feverish swoop of the camera through a Mediterranean landscape
Stabat Mater
Apparitions
Nina Danino
Black and white Super 8 footage is combined with HD images of black and white photographs held in close up reflection, as thoughts and responses to these images are spoken live to the camera. The images are indices of disappearance as are the audio fragments of cinema films (La Dolce Vita 1960 and The Gospel According to St. Matthew 1964) from the same time as the photographs were taken.
Apparitions
Jennifer
Nina Danino
Jennifer del Corazón de Jesús
The film unfolds the life of an enclosed monastery over the course of one day. It invites the audience into a world of enclosure which is rarely seen from the inside. It is a portrait of both the interior of the building and of Jennifer, a Carmelite nun.
Jennifer
