Poetic Manipulations

Astor Place 

Director: Eve Heller
USA, 1997, 10', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

In New York, a camera positioned inside a mirrored storefront captures the impromptu movements of passersby in slow motion. This film, an homage to the Lumière Brothers, challenges the notion of cinematography as a "window to the world," instead provoking reflection on who is observing whom.

Self-Examination Remote Control

Director: Eve Heller
USA, Austria, 1981, 5', DCP, color
No dialogue

The film originated during Eve Heller's years of study under Tony Conrad. Heller stated that after its initial screening, she felt too self-conscious to show the film publicly. As the title indicates, the film confronts the audience with a self-portrait rooted in the interaction between the camera and a remote control (accompanied by voiceovers). The central character is a solemn young woman grappling with a painful identity crisis while engaging with film equipment. The film captures the early, perhaps inevitable phase of cinematic narcissism that many emerging filmmakers experience. It explores the paradoxical situation of simultaneously being both the subject and the object.

Ruby Skin

Director: Eve Heller
USA, 2005, 5', DCP, color
No dialogue

The film serves as a cinematic revenge against the absurdity of countless educational films encountered in American school lessons, driven by an anarchic impulse to create absurdity on 16mm. Essentially, an instructional movie on "creative writing" that had accumulated over the years was taken and deconstructed into its most minor components. Consequently, the background voice's narrative transforms into a colorful cacophony punctuated by sporadic poetic sparks.

Last Lost

Director: Eve Heller
USA, 1996, 14', DCP, color
No dialogue

The film offers the perspective of a chimpanzee as it observes the perplexing human world. Set in Coney Island, it recalls the atmosphere of an innocent entertainment film from the 1940s. The original film's cheerful tone is replaced by slowed-down and magnified visual details that reshape the psychology of the gaze. It is a dreamlike narrative conveyed through the language of silent cinema.

Creme 21

Director: Eve Heller
USA, Austria, 2013, 10', DCP, color
No dialogue

The film is a journey into the elusive nature of time perception. Educational films on the physics, measurement, and perception of time are the material foundation for this cinematic exploration. The film disrupts the original material's logic by employing the 26-frame discrepancy between sound and image on 16mm, creating a poetically expansive contemplation of time for the viewer.

Her Glacial Speed

Director: Eve Heller
USA, 2001, 4', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

In the film, images sourced from various instructional films of the 1970s—deprived of their colors, sounds, and original meanings—are reassembled into a silent poem that delicately shifts between emotions, oscillating between excitement and sorrow. The film offers a pre-linguistic interspace where the medium's materiality is sensed through its visual rhythms and the textures of light.

Behind This Soft Eclipse

Director: Eve Heller
ABD, 2004, 10', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

A landscape of Mount Forest, Ontario. This location is depicted as a gloomy setting in Behind This Soft Eclipse through a high-contrast film technique developed by the filmmaker. The film is dedicated to Canadian filmmaker and writer Marion McMahon, who founded a workshop for independent filmmaking in Mount Forest along with her husband, Philip Hoffman. The film appears to seek out Marion's lost paths.

Singing in Oblivion

Director: Eve Heller
Austria, 2021, 13', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

The film explores death through silent, desolate shots, beginning with silver-toned images of a sun-drenched Jewish cemetery. A chorus of nature accompanies the visuals, with birds chirping like a lost dream in the land of oblivion. As the film progresses, it reveals abstract patterns and shifts between focus and blur. Glass negatives sourced from flea markets unveil fragments of an ancient world, with the filmmaker using textures and overexposure to animate and fragment these photographic artefacts. The subtle hollows in the faces underscore the age of the material. In the end, a baby's serious gaze emerges from everyday life's history.

The screenings will be held with the director in attendance.