Barbara Sternberg
1945 (80 лет)Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life- questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video.
Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists' film and video exhibition group. She wrote a handbook and conducted workshops on Media Literacy for high school teachers. She recently organized the "Association for Film Art" (AFFA) to actively support and promote awareness and appreciation of film art. While living in the Maritimes, Sternberg co-founded Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Sternberg wrote a column, "On (experimental) Film" for several years for Cinema Canada, and has written essays on artists and on filmmakers. As well, she has written on the status of film art in galleries and museums—an issue on which she has conducted symposia and lobbied vigorously.
beating
Barbara Sternberg
To get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts - Under this central trope of 'beating', with its combined negative and positive implications, the film brings together the individual personally lived and the communal, historic perspective; hatred and forgiveness; laughing and crying.
beating
Transitions
Barbara Sternberg
Transitions is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being in-between-between falling asleep and being awake, between here and there, between being and non-being. These metaphysical themes are evoked by the central image of a woman in white over which layers of images and sound (voices) are superimposed.
Transitions
Like a Dream that Vanishes
Barbara Sternberg
"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning). Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.
Like a Dream that Vanishes
Through and Through
Barbara Sternberg
The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger; and the pressure of history on one’s identity-how do I identify myself as “I”, how as part of a “we”? The film is visual, perceptual; it was made in awe of the world that goes on with and without us and of our personal, human struggles. It is a film about life and death; a film of discrete units of the eternal and a film of living here and now. It was built up frame by frame-a film about power, played in insignificant terms, in the daily, barely noticed gestures, scenes, frames.
Through and Through
In the Nature of Things
Barbara Sternberg
The central image of in the nature of things is the Forest- sometimes fearful, sometimes a refuge, always mysterious, and the multiple associations and myths embedded in it- myths within which we live and which live within us- our collective history. But, unexpected moments, intensified fragments, catch us unawares- the present confronts us.
In the Nature of Things
Love Me
Barbara Sternberg
Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating – emotions which conflict, confuse, are difficult to reconcile. The texts ‘speak’ unsaid and unsayable thoughts, impolitic or just impolite. Suppressed exclamations from past injustices, hurts, angers surface, interrupting, erupting, demanding attention.
Love Me
The Earth in the Sea
Barbara Sternberg
Videoed off projected super 8 footage, this short film in four parts (titles from Artaud: “ the earth in the sea, the air in the earth, the fire in the water, the water in the air”) is suggestive of, on some level, the interrelatedness of everything. Porous, fleshy, granular atoms of existence, mutable unending energy, pulsing, beating, burning, blurring, clarifying, obscuring, revealing - fleeting.
The Earth in the Sea
C’est la vie
Barbara Sternberg
A mini-presentation of consciousness dealing with cosmos. The world in a grain of sand. Connections between life, death, and the world are neither static nor symmetrical but flowing and intuitive. The movement of emulsion through which images are seen is like the mind trying to retrieve and put things together. C’est la vie is a positive muscular little thing
C’est la vie
