Sharon Couzin

Her Other Self

Sharon Couzin

Explores the interface and identity of inner and outer, body and object, real and remembered, through a fascination with fetish objects.

Salve

Sharon Couzin

"There's a paradox at the center of Couzin's work, in that for all of the wariness of form and order her films express, they remain tightly organized, elegant formal studies. ... SALVE is her most paradoxical film and, I think, her richest. A young girl's discovery of 'the relationships between the quantities' – of geometry, volume, time, and numbers – is seen as an ineffably tragic development." – Dave Kehr Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival.

OdilonOdilon

Sharon Couzin

ODILONODILON is a portrait of an adolescent boy coming to know himself and his place within his family and society. It uses historic sound: Edward R. Murrow's Christmas Eve broadcast during World War II to the parents of the young children of London's families, urging them to send their youngest to the country to save their lives as a protection against the nightly bombing raids. The "Yanks in December" recording is ironically echoed in the baseball motif in the film. Odilon's love of baseball, eating and cooking and his growing awareness of adulthood's responsibility, ambition and judgement create a brooding tension. Playfulness and intellectual rigor struggle to remain part and parcel of his daily life against the larger backdrops of Alcatraz and World War II.

Old Japan Now

Sharon Couzin

Old Japan Now (2003) explores temple spaces, traditional Noh drama and modern Butoh dance to discover where ritual began and how it persists in modern practices. With footage from several important temples in Kyoto and Tokyo, as well as interviews with practitioners of Noh and Butoh, Old Japan Now seeks to explain some of the historical significance that descends from the Shinto religion and early animism. More poetic than clinical, the film is part diary and part haiku, considering the spiral path of ritual (KJ Mohr).

Elusive Cha-Cha

Sharon Couzin

A portrait of performance artist E.J. Sims, with a soundtrack featuring Robert Metrick's bongo and voice chant punctuating and echoing quick jump cuts, while snippets from an inane romance novel are read with catchy cadence by Lynn Book.

Shells and Rushes

Sharon Couzin

"The lush and mysterious realm evoked by SHELLS AND RUSHES recalls the uncanny eclecticism of the surrealists. Strange, flesh-like sea shells, restlessly turning and quivering; enigmatic allusions to classical mythology, such as the Birth of Venus and Leda and the Swan; and paradoxical uses of positive and negative space variously bring to mind Man Ray, Dali and Cornell. But Couzin's film creates its own rich, secretive world and provides its own astonishing pleasures. Accompanied by an otherworldly soundtrack of ancient throat-singing, this deftly edited film is by turns seductive, humorous and serene." – Rafael Wang

Roseblood

Sharon Couzin

Images of a woman in dance, in flora, in picture, in eyes, in architecture, in sunshine, in color, in crystal, in space, in confusion, in danger, in disintegration, in her hand, in birth, in the Valley of Sorrow, in the sea, in repetition, in sculpture and in herself.

Pauline

Sharon Couzin

Pauline is a film that explores the friendship of two artists, obliquely, through the exploration of a house, a garden and a painting. The qualities of light and time are used to heighten the properties simple acts and objects may take on when mediated by these two elements. The primary subject of the film, then, is not an event, nor a story, but a sense of an artist's process and her relation to the world.

Bouquet

Sharon Couzin

"Focusing on the confident and sensuous movement/"dance"/embodiment of performance artist Lynn Book - and energetically bypassing the strictures of everyday language as well as the demands of narrative - BOUQUET unleashes the visceral force of often-repressed joys. Filmmaker Sharon Couzin and performance artist Lynn Book co-perform the galvanizing sound of BOUQUET. We are invited to experience two women's voices in a marvelous cascade of prelinguistic utterances, laughter of every conceivable joyful "color," evocative breathing and moans unleashed and released in order to close off the need for everyday language. It is as if some pre-Socratic mystery cult materialized by the waterfall, by the garden and in the artist's studio. Yet Couzin's film also amplifies primary energies with modern, subversive and ever-so-sly wit. Dynamic montage and joyful camera movement secure BOUQUET's place as a visionary film that invites the attention of critics and fellow artists alike." - Zack Stiglicz

Deutschland Spiegel

Sharon Couzin

Nimbus Couzin

Deutschland Spiegel is a film of light, shadow, air, stone, fences, soldiers, roads. And words. Footage from old German newsreels and parallel personal footage is edited and optically printed into counterpoint with images of a young boy. The loss of innocence is the boy's, the burden of understanding is ours.

Gradiva

Sharon Couzin

GRADIVA was shot over a period of five summers and weaves a complex set of themes. Based loosely on the Wilhelm Jensen story, "Gradiva," used by Freud in Delusion and Dream to describe the relation of delusion to dream and both to fetishes, GRADIVA is a portrait of a thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old adolescent girl. The word gradiva is Latin, and roughly translates as "one who walks forward most lightly." The film uses several themes, among them, the role of dolls and fetishized objects (especially rocks, bones, sticks, flowers and other natural forms).

A Trojan House

Sharon Couzin

A house of trick cards, the woman as house. "A marvelous smorgasbord of images." – Edgar Daniels "Architectural structures become the structures of relationships, establishing the windows of communication (between parents and children, between lovers) while preserving a sense of enclosure, isolation." – Dave Kehr