To the Distant Observer: On the Films
of Barbara Sternberg
by George Clark
This image appears at the beginning of Barbara Sternberg’s
film A Trilogy, made in 1985, roughly
ten years after her first film. But this image – the swimmer, tense, poised by
the side of the pool – nevertheless marks a beginning, a pause at the point of
entry, within which Sternberg’s films operate. Poised on the borders, her films
explore perception, language and memory, inhabiting the pregnant moments
between actions. With deceptive ease her films range from dense Imagist
collages to lyrical studies of nature, filled with images pregnant with
association, sequences that conjure distant memories, poised on the edge of the
world looking in.
Sternberg began making films privately in the mid 1970s
while working as a teacher. In a revealing anecdote, which we’ll return to
later, she recalls how she first came to make films:
“The first film I made was with my father’s 16mm camera...
My husband at the time didn’t have any home movies and barely any photographs
from his growing-up, so I wanted to make him this home movie, to create a past
for him. But I never thought of it as filmmaking or art or anything.” 1
Having studied filmmaking at Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto, it took a while before she had the confidence to make and
show her own work. Although something of a dead-end – “I was a non-person
there; no one ever looked at my stuff” – this experience didn’t stop her from
continuing to work and make super-8 films “in a way I would later learn to call
‘experimental.’” 2 After parting from her husband she moved to
Sackville, New Brunswick and began teaching at a community arts centre while
continuing to “make little things in super-8 with the boats, the shapes of the
waves, the rhythms of the water.” 3
As part of a project at the arts centre they visited the
local foundry, one of the main employers in the area, to observe and learn
about the day-to-day work there. Inspired, Sternberg formulated her own plan and returned to the factory to interview the men and
film the rituals of their working day. The resultant film, Opus 40 (1979), is a rich and formally complex film exploring
repetition as part of work and life. After completing Transitions (1982), a lyrical study of a female dreamer mixing
superimposed imagery with a poetic narration, she was prompted to submit her
films to the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre to get them seen, an idea
that was new to her: “I never thought that I was making them to show others.” 4
The acceptance of these two works into distribution marked
her tentative move into experimental filmmaking. Sternberg has gone on to make
a body of work that spans three decades, including over 20 single-screen films.
She has participated in many gallery exhibitions with mixed media
installations, performances and videos and been active in championing
experimental film in Canada through her writing and teaching to organizing
screenings, exhibitions and conferences. She also worked at the Canadian
Filmmakers Distribution Centre and was one of the founding members of Pleasure
Dome, an artists’ film and video exhibition group in
Toronto. 5
Sternberg’s body of work can be seen as existing alongside
fellow Canadian filmmakers, particularly Phil Hoffman and Mike Hoolboom, with
whom she has collaborated in many ways. Working in a mode of ‘first-person
filmmaking’, these filmmakers, despite their range of subjects, all share a
subtle questioning of authorship and film form. Active since the 1980s, their
work, and that of their contemporaries, can be seen as distinct from the work
of the generation that preceded them in the 1960s and 1970s, exemplified by the
films of Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland and David Rimmer,
whose work explores the formal and material properties of film while tending to
avoid the intimate or personal.
Sternberg describes the differences between this generation
and her films: “I like Snow’s work. I like conceptualist, minimalist work. And
yet my work is multi and messy and accumulates meaning through fragments which
are layered and more personal.” 6
The specifics of any culture can barely be grasped at arm’s
length and are coloured as much by the nature and politics of experimental film
distribution and criticism as by the work that is actually made. The difficulty
of understanding the context within which work is made and exhibited is
compounded by the marginality of experimental film. Largely supported by
communities of practitioners and enthusiasts (both amateur and professional, if
that term can be used in this context), experimental film has a heightened
sense both of locality and internationality as compared to industrial film
production. The communities which support and help produce and distribute work
are smaller and more closely linked.
This is demonstrated in part in Sternberg’s own career where
as well as making work, she has helped to exhibit, distribute and write about
the work of her peers. The range of work that is seen internationally and
written about is equally small—a dominance which is especially true of works of
the American avant-garde, from Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren
to Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol.
Sternberg’s work, although well-versed in classical
avant-garde is distinct and dependent on a range of more local factors.
Populated and assisted by friends and fellow filmmakers, her work evokes an
intimate sense of community which is both drawn from the material environment
(from the industrial surroundings in Opus
40 to the rural in Praise) and
also responding to the cultural context in which she is working (for example,
the self-reflexive At Present). As I
will argue, the strength of Sternberg’s work, while being highly articulate and
informed, comes from its very specifics – the precision of its tone and references
– rather than from generic signifiers of avant-garde film.
Sternberg’s work fluctuates between what we could regard as
the ‘metropolitan’ and the ‘rural,’ from highly literal to the highly
subjective. A similar dichotomy can be found in the work of Scottish pioneer
Margaret Tait whose life and work from the 1950s to
the 1990s was split between Edinburgh and the Orkney islands, between dense
works of complex poetic montage and works of extreme modesty totally immersed
in her surroundings. 7
In
both filmmakers the relationship between the material of film and its
reflection in natural phenomena has as a counterpoint a self-critical
exploration of the role and function of art in life and society.
The title for this essay is taken from the ancient Japanese
author and poet Ki no Tsurayuki
[872-945] which in turn was taken for the title of Noel Burch’s pioneering
study of Japanese Cinema To the Distant
Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema. The poem is as follows:
“To the distant observer
They are chatting of the blossoms
Yet in spite of appearances
Deep in their hearts
They are thinking very different thoughts” 8
Burch wrote his polemical study, first published in 1979,
from the point of view of an outsider to Japanese cinema and culture. Despite
his in-depth knowledge of his subject he was distancing himself from more
‘canonical’ or ‘definitive’ studies of Japanese film and culture published in
the West, in order to reinstate Japanese cinema as a separate entity, with its
own politics and aesthetics distinct from those of Western cinema and what
Burch calls ‘dominant cinema’. The poem is a brilliant prompt or mantra,
invoking the difficulty to view things for what they are, to avoid ‘chatting of
the blossoms’ while ‘thinking very different thoughts’.
Any study of cinema should strive to take note of the
specifics of the culture it approaches but also the perspective that is brought
by the observer. It is with this spirit and distance in mind that I will
approach Sternberg’s work and seek to expand and open up various trends and
themes with this essay. Rather than fold Sternberg’s work into an
internationalist avant-garde, it is my intention to define and explore her
distinct model of aesthetics and production in order to unravel some of the particularities
of her work.
* * *
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Interviewer: How do
you handle the repetition?
Factory worker: What
do you mean? There’s certain jobs here that they need
worse than the other. So I’ll make those jobs first, you know the ones that
they really need. Then when I get time I’ll make the rest of them. […] I try to
do the same amount every day.
Extract from the soundtrack of Opus 40 (Barbara Sternberg, 1979)
The Enterprise Foundry, where Sternberg made her film Opus 40, consisted of two parts, half
modern making electrical cookers and half traditional employing processes
dating back to 1837 to make cast iron parts for wood-burning stoves. The men
who worked in the old factory “thought of themselves more as craftsmen than the
assembly line workers in the modern plant.” The old foundry became the subject
of the film, which took its name after the workers’ 40-hour weeks.
The film begins with voices heard over the credits: a woman
asks a worker questions about his routine at the foundry. The interview is left
open and the voice-over replaced by a quietly-read extract from Gertrude
Stein’s The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family (1934).
While the film formally documents the processes and actions of the workers, the
camera focuses on the repeated gestures of the men. Made using a Fuji super-8
camera, Sternberg created in-camera double exposures, splitting the frame
horizontally in order to present a parallel series of actions on the top and
bottom of the image.
Invited to show the film at MayWorks,
a festival which annually celebrates labour in art (which still takes place in
various cities through Canada now), the formal, almost serial structure of the
film was met with confusion by the audience. Largely expecting a cinema-verité or agit-prop exposé of
poor working conditions, the audience rejected the film on this literal level,
displaying their conservatism and also an inherent problem with documentary of
the time. People’s belief that the film should condemn the conditions of the
workers blinded them to the dedication and skill of the workers’ craft – who
rejected the notion that their day was repetitive – and missed the rituals and
near-extinct form of labour that the film subtly celebrates.
This emblematic film, a formal study of action and ritual,
marks a crucial involvement with the American modernist writer Gertrude Stein
(1874 –1946), whose theories of repetition and aesthetics are central to
Sternberg’s filmmaking and many avant-garde filmmakers from Stan Brakhage to Marie Menken. A central element of Stein’s
influence stems from her theory and use of repetition, as described by Stan Brakhage:
“[T]here is no such thing as repetition, in the sense that
Gertrude Stein made clear in her book The
Making of Americans. She demonstrates that when you ‘repeat’ a thing, you
charge it with another level of energy; so that if you vary it, however
slightly, it is dynamic. It is much more dramatic if you repeat an image and
make slight variations.” 9
Stein’s most famous poem, rose is a rose is a rose is a
rose, was written as part of the 1913 poem Sacred Emily. 10 Central
now to an understanding of Stein, the poem, which is often understood as
meaning ‘things are what they are’, brilliantly displays the ambiguity of language
and its dependence on its context for its meaning. Stein argues that each
reinstatement of rose is different due to its context. Shared with other
modernist poets such as TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, Stein’s work can be seen in
part as an attempt to rediscover what lies behind nouns. In this light, the
attempt to reclaim words from their context, we can understand Stein’s
statement that “in that line the rose is red for the first time in English
poetry for a hundred years.” 11
“Repetition is a feature in all my films because it’s how we
experience life. Each summer suggests summers past, all summers. The minute you
dive into the water it’s like every time that’s ever happened.” 12
Sternberg’s work draws on literary references and
construction, from modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf to the
Romantic poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Her film Tending Towards the Horizontal, made in 1988, nearly a decade after Opus 40, is constructed around the
formal properties of building on the outskirts of Toronto and a complex
literary narration. The title derives from Sternberg’s admission that in
gathering footage for the film she was drawn to film streets and rows of houses
for their formal properties in the same was that the rhythm and actions of the
factory workers where filmed for Opus 40.
A woman’s voice is heard on the soundtrack reading letters
discussing the film and what form the narration should take. This
self-reflexive, leisurely film recounts a refracted series of metaphors that
are created and dismantled through this process of discussion and revision. The
narration, written by Acadian poet France Daigle, is spoken in English and
French, and revolves around three central metaphors – a bird flapping its wings
tirelessly, a figure who sits on a hay bale, and a woman in a library who reads
only what others have left behind – and correspondences with Sternberg about
the film. 13 Phrases and words are returned to and repeated and, as
in Stein’s work, the meaning is shifted and re-configured against different
imagery and our growing familiarity with them. The imagery of houses, their
construction and destruction, is washed in autumnal light which at times fills
the screen entirely with yellows or oranges.
For this film Sternberg wanted “[t]he image to be more
incidental, to cast away the signifier. I wanted to communicate something else.
I didn’t want someone to view the image as a series of identifications of words
- house, person, car, building. I didn’t want someone
to read the film, I wanted someone to see it. So I was
collecting images I knew I had to have without quite knowing why.” 14
As it progresses, the film uproots itself both in space and
time, the verbal metaphors take over from the imagery in order to construct a
parallel habitat to the buildings we see; a parallel space conjured by
language. This rich and enigmatic work shifts and questions the authority of
its addresses – moving from the local to the national, from the intimate
correspondences to the poetic text – all the time laterally shifting the focus
from the city to the metaphors for flight, belonging and home. The film is akin
to Chantel Ackerman’s News From Home (1976), in which formally-composed long static shots
of New York are accompanied by the voice of the Belgian director reading
letters between herself and her mother, commenting on their generational
differences as well as the filmmaker’s own distance from her home country and
language. As in that film, Tending Towards the Horizontal too describes an attempt to
connect to our surroundings and environment, to find something solid, to find a
site for the self.
* * *
This is a film about you, not about its maker 15
Sternberg’s story about the making of her first film, a home
move for her husband, “to create a past for him,” reveals the importance and
necessity with which she regards film. 16 Film is central to our
understanding of time and memory, for recording our lives and for our sense of
self, of our past, our sense of belonging. In seeking to make home movies for her
husband, to make a film to reclaim an unrecoverable past, she articulates a
broader ambition to marry the intimate with the universal. Home movies are
documents of family but also aesthetic forms, talismans and are part of the
artistic tradition of memento mori; works that remind
us of our mortality and inspire reveries and remembrance.
Moving between intimate and universal forms, Sternberg’s
work skillfully combines the specific with the poetic
or metaphoric. The use of footage culled from a life of documentation harnesses
the evocative power of film to summon our past and return us to our memories.
The quotidian, for Sternberg, is a route to creating ambiguous and evocative
documents of lives never lived. These works fulfil the paradoxical position of
being false and truthful at the same time. The paradox of filmic
identification, representation and authorship is brilliantly questioned and
subverted in Owen Land’s film Remedial
Reading Comprehension, made in 1970. This landmark film, a brilliant depiction
of the alienated filmmaker adrift in a world of processed images, displays the
line “This is a film about you, not about its maker” seen over an image of the
filmmaker running, outlines the paradox at the heart of any form of expression.
A similar paradox is outlined in R.D. Laing’s famous poem, quoted in
Sternberg’s film At Present:
“They are playing a game.
They are playing at not playing a game.
If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and
they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.” 17
The absurdity and paradox of personal expression is not lost
on Sternberg, who uses home movies and the form of first-person film to weave
her complex explorations of identity and memory in works ranging from A Trilogy (1985), with its three
interlocking stories, both domestic and metaphorical; to the intimate
observations and candid recollections that populate At Present (1990); and most recently in the haiku-like glimpses and
fragments of a life past and present in the Time
Being I – IV series (2007).
At Present
returns us to Sternberg’s friends and fellow filmmakers who populate the work
which she has described as “a news report on the state of love.” Seemingly a
series of meetings with close friends reflecting on love, nothing is as it
appears. The film subverts forms of intimacy and documentary to create a
multi-layered comment on her surroundings and critiques self-involvement and
the hypocrisies inherent in expressions of love. The series of portraits is
accompanied by voiceovers, one recounting media clichés of love, the other a
series of parables which play over images of people filmed in their homes. The
film can be seen as a response to works of her contemporaries such as the
aforementioned Mike Hoolboom (who appears in the film) and Phil Hoffman, among
others. As she states, “I kept seeing all these male Toronto filmmakers making
work about love. So my film is a response to these films.” 18
In borrowing the language and intimacy of home movies –
relaxed voiceover, images of friends – the film moves to subvert and recontextualise these images and people, to reframe their
vanity in a way that both reveals the self-involvement of the speakers and of
language. The R.D. Laing quote read in the film brings us back to ritual, the
unravelling of linguistic clichés and the documentary or diaristic
form itself. The film starts and ends with seemingly unconnected images—the
silent shout of an aboriginal man and a final smile, again silent, of an older
man from the same community. Akin to the diver’s pause on the edge of the
swimming pool in A Trilogy, the film
is bracketed between two continuous actions and while reflecting a present
moment, it also shows how everything is part of a historical continuum.
A Trilogy
was Sternberg’s first funded film. It involves a complex triangulation of three
experiences of the world – a man running down a road, a young couple having
breakfast and a school boy playing on a hillside – with three interstices,
namely a series of historical facts; a story of an initiation rite; and a list
of questions. These elements are interlocked in a complex choreography of
metaphors on motherhood and masculinity.
Central to the film is a young boy (the filmmaker’s son)
filmed on holiday in England playing on Silbury Hill,
a Neolithic mound and fertility symbol. A series of letters between the
filmmaker and her son are read on the soundtrack, outlining the separation and
maturity of their relationship. Mixed into the film’s rich metaphoric
vocabulary, this intimate material is woven into a splintered and pointedly
inconclusive study of motherhood and masculinity.
The enveloping of such quotidian material into the highly
structured film of staged and invented scenes and anecdotes demonstrates
Sternberg’s self-conscious attempt to embrace, yet move beyond the personal and
entertain the paradox of being a film about and not about its maker.
* * *
Natural Phenomena
“But because truly being here is so much; because everything
here
Apparently needs us, this fleeting world which in some
strange way
Keeps calling to us. Us the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once, no more. And we too,
Just once. And never again. But to have been
This once completely, even if only once,
To have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.” 19
This extract from the German late Romantic poet Rainer Maria
Rilke’s Ninth Elegy is read at the
beginning of Sternberg’s short film Once
(2007) over a black screen. The poem describes a present moment but also outlines
an inseparable sense of belonging and connection to the world. Once the poem
has been read, heightened by hand processing, the black screen gives way to a
tactile, distant light, fighting to get through dense undergrowth. In silence
the light blazes and fights to fill the screen, as if trying to reinstate a
connection to the world through film.
A fascination with the elements permeates Sternberg’s work.
Images of water and fire, in particular, reoccur in film after film, from the
swimmer – a central motif from A Trilogy
onwards – to the fire of the burning field in At Present, and most recently in Burning (2002),
which
uses the texture and rhythm of flames to structure its montage. These elemental
forces move alongside an interest in the natural world and its phenomena. As
quoted earlier, Sternberg’s early fascination with filming “the shapes of the
waves, the rhythms of the water” can similarly be extended to her fascination
with the shapes of light falling on the earth and the rhythm of fire.
The long film Midst
(1997) is probably Sternberg’s most fully abstract or pastoral work. As writer
Gerald Saul commented, it is “a part of the environment rather than, as with
many of Sternberg’s other films, an agitated outsider.” 20 The film
consolidates many currents that have permeated her work – the rhythm and
texture of the natural world and the elements; bursts of colour, light and
movement – framed by the grain and processes of film. Completely silent, a
choice that Sternberg states “came partly out of my appreciation as a viewer of
Brakhage’s silent films, this beam of light
connecting you directly and powerfully to the screen. Language activates a
different part of the mind, distancing viewer and image. I can trust the images
alone.” 21
Canada, the second largest country in the world also has one
of the lowest population densities, its land extending the breadth of North
America and up to the Arctic Ocean. With a country and landmass this vast it is
not surprising that its artists and filmmakers have produced works of epic
proportions—from Michael Snow’s film Le
Region Central (1970-71) which runs to over three hours and was shot in a
mountainous landscape roughly 100 miles to the north of Sept-Isles in Quebec to
Joyce Wieland’s similarly epic La Raison Avant la Passion (1968-69), which travels Canada from
coast to coast, to name just two. American filmmaker Hollis Frampton, who
collaborated with Wieland on this and later films, described it as follows:
“This film is about the pain and joy of living in a very
large-space: in fact, in a continent. It is painful, because ‘true patriot
love’, a reasonable passion, can contain it after all. But what is remarkable
for me, is that all its urgency is lucidly caught, bound as it were chemically,
in the substance of film itself, requiring no exterior argument.” 22
Frampton’s comments could similarly be used to illuminate
the scale and ambition of Sternberg’s long-form films such as midst, “the pain
and joy of living in a very large space,” as well as her films of life, family
and friends in Canada, such as the celebratory Praise, which depicts friends and women relaxing intercut with
images of light through trees and reflecting off water and many earlier works.
What would appear as first-person or diaristic
in other films is returned to in the nostalgic and elegiac film C’est La Vie (1997) which pushes the material
investigation of film and the natural world, with old degraded photos and film,
into a cosmic register. What appears to be stock footage, with signs of age or
wear, of animals in their habitat – a swan taking off, bats flying at night –
is edited alongside abstract images of the earth. As
Sternberg states: “Increasingly, my films are made out of footage I already
have. I have a bank of images at home, which for now at least are
enough. I almost don’t need to shoot anymore, whenever I think of something I
already have an image of it.” 23
Drawing on this library, the film is a dense montage of
images and experiences which seems to be elaborating a grand theory of being,
from the grain of film to the cosmos, but as Sternberg has stated “there’s no
mystery to solve, it’s all right there in front of us.” 24
The
wonder and fascination with natural phenomena, manifested in part through an
interrogation of the material and quality of film, permeates Sternberg’s work
and, married with her critical enquiry into aesthetics, led her to produce one
of her most sophisticated works. The film Like
A Dream That Vanishes (1999) unravels with images of pure colour, discarded
shot-ends and flashes of imagery, from which the film and accompanying
soundtrack by Rainer Wiens builds its symphonic
structure around questions of ‘wonder’ and ‘doubt’. As William C Wees describes:
“It is philosophical, that is to say, calm, rational and
imbued with a kind of intense equanimity, in its acceptance of the ephemerality of life (and film) and the doubtfulness of
ever arriving at final answers or infallible truths.” 25
The film’s complex array of imagery is drawn from across
Sternberg’s body of work, with recurrent images and motifs returned to and recontextualised in the films broader framework. Lightning,
the movement of fire, rays reflecting on water and other natural phenomena are
placed alongside intimate footage of the family, children playing and domestic
life. The film is intercut with an interview with the retired philosopher, John
Davis (partner of Rae Davis, Sternberg’s frequent collaborator), who introduces
explicit philosophical themes drawn from David Hume on the nature or possibility
of ‘miracles’, to the influential logician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems. The theories that are discussed run alongside the increasingly
complex montage of imagery that grows in richness throughout the film. 26
The strength of the film and its philosophical enquiry lie
in the interaction of language and image. As Sternberg’s work shows time and
again, image and language operate on different planes and as with Stein,
everything is dependent on its context and interaction with what is around it.
The text is brilliantly couched in the film’s broader and rougher enquiries and
explorations into phenomena, that of film and art, of time and memory, of
light, colour and rhythm, of family and nature.
The Riddle of
Lumen, a film made by Stan Brakhage in
1972, was an attempt to create a riddle in film:
“The classical riddle was meant to be heard, of course. Its
answers are contained within its questions; and on the smallest piece of itself
this possibility depends upon SOUND -- ‘utterly,’ like they say... the pun is
its pivot. Therefore, my Riddle of Lumen depends upon qualities of LIGHT. All
films do, of course. But with The Riddle
of Lumen, ‘the hero’ of the film is light/itself. It is a film I’d long
wanted to make - inspired by the sense, and specific formal possibilities, of
the classical English language riddle… only one appropriate to film and, thus,
as distinct from language as I could make it.” 27
Brakhage’s
film, in its reliance on formal properties of light, focuses on the phenomena
of film, art and life which form the riddle at the heart of the film. Sternberg
shares a fascination with phenomena, and her work seems to suggest a similarly
complex riddle to be unravelled. While she follows in the tradition and draws
on a range of formal and structural techniques pioneered in part by Brakhage, her films mark their place in time, beyond the
modernist ambition of these filmmakers. Sternberg’s work, deeply imbued as it
is with the history of modernism, is so reflectively and critically, drawing on
these traditions and movements while attempting to establish the parameters for
film and art at the end of the millennium.
As one critic shrewdly noted, Sternberg’s film shows that
“at the end...the dream that vanishes is the dream of Brakhage’s
modernism, the dream that nature offers a miraculous coherence and beauty open
to anyone who knows how to truly see.” 28
“The world isn’t a very tidy place. We think it is, but it
isn’t. It’s a very messy place.” —John Davis
At the end we shall return to the pool where the diver was
stood at the beginning. The concluding images of A Trilogy, though, come from below the water, looking up to the
surface. Fingertips break the glacial plane and the woman’s body cuts into the
water, surrounded by air bubbles rushing in the opposite direction to her
descending body. The diver disappears from view only to re-enter the frame head
first from the bottom. But prior to resurfacing for air the image freezes. The
swimmer is suspended, poised yet again but this time on the other side of the
threshold.
* * *
George Clark is a writer, curator and artist based in
London. He studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2003. His
curatorial projects include the retrospective The Cinema of Miklos
Jancso (Riverside Studios, London 2003), Without
Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video (Encounters Festival, Bristol,
2005; ICA, London; and Cambridge Film Festival, 2006); and The Unstable States
of… (Lighthouse, Brighton, 2007). Between 2006 and 2008 he was the Artists’
Moving Image Development Officer at the Independent Cinema Office in London,
where he managed a range of projects including Artists & Icons (UK touring
2006-2008) and Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema (Tate Modern,
London and touring 2008) and projects in collaboration with no.w.here,
LUX and Frieze Projects. His writing has been published in Art Monthly, Senses
of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine.
This essay was
commissioned for, and originally appeared in, the publication AURORA 2008: The
Infinite Measure, published as a companion to the festival AURORA itself.
Notes
1 Mike Hoolboom,
Transitions: Barbara in the Eighties: an Interview —at
www.barbarasternberg.com/Interviews/80s%20interview%20by%20Mike%20Hoolboom.htm
2
ibid.
3
ibid.
4
ibid.
5 Pleasure Dome
presents a year round programme of film and video screenings and exhibitions in
and around Toronto since 1989. For further details visit www.pdome.org
6 Mike Hoolboom,
Transitions: Barbara in the Eighties: an Interview, as before
7 Margaret Tait was born in 1918 and died 1998 in Kirkwall on Orkney,
Scotland. As writer Ali Smith states “A clear example of, and pioneer of, the
poetic tradition, the experimental tradition, the democratic tradition, in the
best of risk-taking Scottish cinema.” —from www.luxonline.org.uk/tours/margaret_tait(1).html
8 Scolar Press, London, 1973. Revised and edited by Annette
Michelson.
9 Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End: Essays on American independent
filmmakers, Polygon, Edinburgh, 1989, p.135
10 This poem was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the
1913 poem Sacred Emily, which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays
(Four Seas, Boston, 1922). The Making of Americans: The Hersland
Family was written between 1906-1908 but not published
until 1934.
11 Four in America, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1947.
12 Mike Hoolboom, Barbara Sternberg in the 90s —at www.
barbarasternberg.com/Interviews/90s%20interview%20by%20Mike%20Hoolboom.htm
13 Acadiens are the descendants of the seventeenth-century
French colonists who settled in Acadia (located in the Canadian Maritime
provinces – Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island – and some in
the American state of Maine). Although today most of the Acadians and Québécois
are francophone Canadians, Acadia was founded in a geographically separate
region from Quebec (‘Canada’ at this time) leading to their two distinct
cultures.
14 Mike Hoolboom, Transitions: Barbara in the Eighties: an
Interview, as before
15 This line is central to Remedial Reading Comprehension, a
film by Owen Land (formerly George Landow), US, 1970.
The line appears in the film as scrolling text across an image of the filmmaker
running.
16 Mike Hoolboom, Transitions: Barbara in the Eighties: an
Interview, as above
17 R.D. Laing, Knots. Penguin, London, 1970.
18 Mike Hoolboom, Transitions: Barbara in the Eighties: an
Interview, as before
19 From Ahead of All
Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. by
Stephen Mitchell
20 Mike Hoolbom, ed., Like a Dream
that Vanishes: the Films of Barbara Sternberg. Pub. by the Images Festival of Independent Film & Video and
Pleasure Dome, Toronto, 2000.
21 Mike Hoolboom, Barbara Sternberg in the 90s, as before
22 Programme note from LUX Distribution catalogue at
catalogue.lux.org.uk
23 Mike Hoolboom, Barbara Sternberg in the 90s, as before
24 ibid.
25 William C. Wees, Everyday
Wonders in Barbara Sternberg’s Like a Dream that Vanishes
26 Kurt Gödel (April 28, 1906, Brünn,
Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) – January 14, 1978 Princeton, New
Jersey) was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician and philosopher.
27 Programme notes from The Filmmakers Co-operative
distribution catalogue, New York —at
www.film-makerscoop.com
28 Craig Fischer, Children, Nature, Fragmentation:
An Idiosyncratic Review of the New York Film Festival’s ‘Views from the Avant-Garde’ — at www.hi-beam.net/hi-beam/fischer.html