Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
MY GAZE COVERS YOU LIKE IVY: THE FILMS OF ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR
July 29 – July 30
This summer Anthology is graced by a visit from Austrian experimental filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr, who will present a three-program survey of films made over the past 10 years, all of them screening on 16mm or 35mm.
Zwirchmayr’s films are distinguished by the carefully considered precision of their construction, the meditative stillness of their rhythms, and above all by their preoccupation with bodies, objects, and landscapes, which are rendered with an extraordinary degree of tactility. In Zwirchmayr’s hands, bodies and landscapes come to occupy the same plane of perception. She consistently places people and objects in various natural environments in a way that is both incongruous and evocative, resulting in a fascinating confusion of scale, abstraction, and representation. Her films demonstrate an abiding interest in juxtaposing strikingly different kinds of substances – skin and stone, fire and ice, plant and textile – and an extraordinary ability to convey the emotional, mental, and physical frisson that results. And she films both bodies and landscapes with such an attention to detail and texture that the bodies are transformed into landscapes, and vice versa. This is the case not only in the highly condensed, meditative short works that make up the larger part of her filmography, but also in the “What I Remember” trilogy of personal essay films that explore the remarkable, troubled history of her own family in a singularly elliptical style.
These programs gather together a selection of Zwirchmayr’s work over the past decade, including the “What I Remember” trilogy, as well as several brand-new films.
