Beating
64 minutes 16mm 1995

“Beating” — 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. Also brought in relation: the politics of gender and the holocaust; the Old World and North America. Passages of emotion - our lives as we experience them today - move through a terrain of memory and anlaysis.

Beating exists in the area of boundaries. I work with images as they can be registered between abstraction and representation, between blurred and defined, between the formless and the formed in-between, in motion. I try to render images suggestively, bodily and to use vocalizations and words for texture as well as information. "Water, like fire, is a dimension of the carnival insisting on the stateless and the flux... a world in which hierarchies were collapsing, boundaries dissolving... a state of becoming, not of being." (Robert Kroetsch) The film's surface, scratched and mottled, negative and positive, black & white and colour bears witness to storms of emotion. From section to section, repetitions occur, connections are made—reminiscences, equivalences between different images—to achieve the feeling or recognition that everything is related. It is all there all the time. (B.ST)

“With Beating, Sternberg's work moves into new territory as she focuses on the tactile nature of film (through bleaching, scratching, bipacking and re-filming), as well as taking on a much more haunting vision. Body parts, statues, birds in flight and sepia-toned images of Jews in prison camps take on an astounding and breathtaking rhythm. In Sternberg's words "Beating considers horror/fascination, evil/good, dark/light, and the relation between these terms, the one the flip side of the other... Beating looks at and listens to the parts of ourselves (myself) hidden in the shadow." A jarring and potent soundtrack blends silence with natural human sounds (groans, sighs, yells) and history's voices. Beating stands as one of Sternberg's finest films to date and a testament to her constant re-examination of the self and its relationship to the history it is caught in.” (Alex MacKenzie, Blinding Light Cinema)

"This supremely lyrical ‘beating’ makes some brutal connections." (Peter Goddard, Toronto Star)

“Sight and sound are central components of memory, and likewise of the cinema. With Beating, Barbara Sternberg challenges our understanding of the relationship between memory and cinema by challenging us to see and hear a highly controlled flow of images and sounds that collide, fragment and flicker, to create a landscape of impressions that are both mystifying and provocative. At the same time she deals with issues that are by no means easy to grapple with. Images of Nazis, sexual organs, lynched Jews, and a couple that appear to be involved in a dance that evokes a sexual struggle are just a few of the powerful images that stay with one long after the film is over. Sternberg's film has a 25-part structure that at times hardly seems to exist because of the fluidity and purpose with which each shot meets the next. The depth of the filmic text (which itself borrows from texts of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Hélène Cixous, and Hannah Arendt) is matched by the intricate depth of the projected images (many of which have gone through generations of optical printing) and sounds. The intellectualizing here never veers into pure abstraction; it is always grounded in the world, whether through the evocation of memory or through the images from nature. These moments of natural beauty and repose both contrast with and provide a reprieve from the density of the text itself; this repose, however, is one of continuous movement, and while that may seem paradoxical, one must recognize that although the film is never far from the beauty and colour of its sensuous imagery, it is also never far from its scratches; its black-and-white negative photography; and finally the specter of Nazism and the danger of forgetting the Patriarchal seeds which bred it. Ultimately we are forced, through the strength of the images and the intensity of Sternberg's vision, to remember what we have seen, what we have heard, and what we have lived through in time.” (Jeffrey Lambert, San Francisco Cinemateque Programme Notes)

Beating credits
Producer/Director/Writer: Barbara Sternberg
Length: 64 minutes
Year of Production: 1995
Sound: Barbara Sternberg. Texts from Virginia Woolf, Helene Cixous, Jim McSwain, Barbara Sternberg and others (English)
Country of Production: Canada
Exhibition format: 16mm
Preview format: vhs

Available from: Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre
telephone: 416-588-0725, e-mail: bookings@cfmdc.org
web: www.cfmdc.org

Lightcone
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