"Sharon Couzin's short films present the familiar problems of communication, with their fragmented off-screen narrations weaving in and out of sync with the images, writing and rewriting themselves as they go along. But those narrations also have a personal voice, a function as dramatic monologue that is unusual in independent film... Couzin wrote poetry before turning to film, and words--for their concrete rhythmic value and aural grain-- clearly continue to fascinate her... 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..." --Dave Kehr
Sharon Couzin has been making films since the early Seventies. She is currently the head of the Film Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Deutschland Spiegel: "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 boy. The loss of innocence is the boy's; the burden of understanding is ours. (Warning: contains proofs that things close in upon us without our noticing.)" --S.C. (1980, 12 mins, color and black-and-white)
Salve: "This film 'plays' with language and history in a naive way, weaving, in the words of a child, a disappearing landscape into the fabric of a film of numbers, sounds and textures." --S.C. "Salve is Couzin's 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. (1981, 14 mins, color)
Plus New Films.