Nina Fonoroff

Age 12: Love with a Little L

Jennifer Montgomery

Nina Fonoroff, Robin Guarino

This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

Rolls and Stumbles with Cherries in the Middle

Saul Levine

Alison Tsoi, Nina Fonoroff

Impersonations for the camera by Alison Tsoi, Nina Fonoroff, and Saul Levine. Additional camera by Silvia Gruner. (For Pelle Lowe and Luther Price)

A Knowledge They Cannot Lose

Nina Fonoroff

Using both found footage and her own material, Nina Fonoroff recollects the memory of her father. Constructing and deconstructing a portrait, she weaves family and friends’ remembrances with an inquiry into her own work process. Her searching attitude suggests that with the loss of her father came a question of the role, not of a particular father, but the father figure—a refusal of authority, and an appreciation of her father’s cycles of learning, teaching, learning. As Danny Kaye, playing Hans Christian Andersen, tells a group of children the story of the piece of chalk that saw itself as a the source, not the transmitter of knowledge, one senses Fonoroff’s sorrow at the loss inherent in the film image, and a yearning for the source of the image, not just its projection.