“Marjorie Keller has been making films for over a decade. Daughters of Chaos is her most recent work. With it, she is established as a major filmmaker, perhaps the only major filmmaker the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.”--Amy Taubin, Artforum, Summer 1981.
In writing of the films of Marjorie Keller over the years, critic Amy Taubin has placed her in the forefront of feminist avant-garde filmmaking, in part for her important reworking of the principles of the “patriarch” of avant-garde filmmaking, Stan Brakhage. Misconception (1978), which deals in roughly chronological sequence with the birth of a baby, is pointed to by Taubin as an antidote, as it were, to Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving. “Birth in Tolstoy. Birth in Stan Brakahage. The representations which men have made of motherhood constitute a threat by which men cause women to suppress the complexity of their feelings or to bear these feelings with enormous guilt. What we see in Keller's film is that motherhood produces ambivalent feelings, and this ambivalence is most heightened in the actual process of birth...and (does) not in any way fit neatly into an idealized myth....”
Daughters of Chaos (1979) is another kind of document. “Its central concern is female bonding,” writes Taubin. “(But) the event it describes is a wedding. This is the powerful contradiction of the film.... It is highly fragmented, built on rapid and multiple contradictions and shifts of meaning achieved primarily through the juxtapositions and displacements of image and sound.... (We) realize that Keller's strongest gifts as a filmmaker (are) the subtlety of her awareness of gesture and the extraordinary fluidity and assurance of her editing.... (Keller acknowledges her) debt to Stan Brakhage, to the radical innovations achieved through the combination of his hand-held camera and disjunctive editing practice. But Keller challenges the visionary ideal on which Brakhage's work is based by using sound to condition, contradict and call into question the meaning of images.”