Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
THE FILMS OF BETZY BROMBERG
June 7 – June 12
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Anthology is pleased to present the first comprehensive NYC retrospective of the work of filmmaker Betzy Bromberg, whose steadfast commitment over the past 40 years to the medium of 16mm has resulted in a highly distinctive body of short films, and more recently a trilogy of exquisite experimental features, whose most recent part – GLIDE OF TRANSPARENCY – will be making its New York premiere.
Bromberg is a major figure in avant-garde cinema, both as a filmmaker and as the Director of the Program in Film and Video at CalArts, a position she assumed in 2002 (two decades after graduating from the school and making some of her earliest films there). For all these avant-garde bona fides, her career is fascinating as well for having bridged the most experimental and the most commercial forms of cinema, thanks to her work in Hollywood throughout the 1980s-90s as a supervisor and camerawoman for the production of optical effects in films including THE TERMINATOR, TRON, WOLFEN, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, and many others. As Deigo Treretola of the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente has pointed out, this intriguingly category-busting quality of her career is only a further manifestation of her mastery of the technical dimensions of the medium, and of her proclivity, even within her own work, for moving freely from one approach to another. Her early films incorporate intentionally raw and provocative imagery, jagged editing, intuitive juxtapositions, and carefully crafted audio tracks, while her most recent works qualify as some of the most sustained, intimate, and epic-scale investigations into the nature of light and its photochemical interaction with the film strip since Brakhage’s TEXT OF LIGHT.
Bromberg will be here in person to present this survey of her multi-faceted and gloriously analogue body of work!
