“Holly Fisher and Ellen Gaine are two filmmakers who approach home movie footage by rephotographing it, finding new values in the original films. Both are purely visual filmmakers. Yet what is most interesting is the difference in visual fields which their two distinct methods achieve: Gaine's black-and-white, Super-8 films rephotographed from a projected image are microscopic, intimate in nature, while the effect of Fisher's 16mm, color films blown up from Super-8 is expansive.” (Steve Anker, San Francisco Cinematheque). Note: Holly Fisher will appear at the Cinematheque (S.F. Art Institute) on October 10.
Rushlight: “Rushlight is the first completed section (Part II) of an on-going trilogy called East/West Cycle, (which) will span a trip made from Romania to Documenta (Kassel, Germany) to Paris.... Rushlight...was...shot on a weekend while driving through the Maramuresh district of northern Romania, near the Russian border.... (In reworking the material,) each frame, or frame-cluster...is treated in the manner of a found object. My daily process involves a collaboration of chance, system, impulse, and serendipity, whereby while working in a context of formal analysis, the work centers in a play (meditation) with the expressive potential of motion” (Holly Fisher). A film by Holly Fisher. (1984, 42 mins, Color, Print from filmmaker)
#3: “#3 represents an accumulation of day-to-day images shot over ten years, which I vignetted and which are connected by abstraction of the surface through rephotography.... At the time my main concern was to create a continuity in disparate images, to depict my own particular modes of moment-to-moment perception in filmic rhetoric, i.e., the way one's attention drifts, as one walks across the room, from contour to idea to memory to associated experiences, not randomly, but as one is inclined on that particular day, given internal meanderings and external stimuli” (Ellen Gaine). (1981, 28 mins). Great Neck: “The shadow imprint of one suburban American childhood.... Memory and gesture/memory and light diffused through venetian blinds” (E.G.). (1980, 13 mins). Edge: (1984, 3 mins, Color). (Films by Ellen Gaine, Silent, Super-8mm, 18 fps, Prints from filmmaker)
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