18 Apr Flesh Into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield

Anthology Film Archives presents a very special event A Celebration: Screening, Book signing, Wine/Champagne Reception for

FLESH INTO LIGHT: THE FILMS OF AMY GREENFIELD by ROBERT HALLER

published by Intellect Books (www.intellectbooks.com) with US distribution by University Of Chicago Press Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Ave, NYC April 30, 2012 7PM Tickets $9, No reservations The evening will begin with a screening of a selection of Greenfield’s award-winning pioneering and recent cine-dance and video-dance, highlighted by the premiere of BodySongs. In 1979 Greenfield was commissioned by WGBH TV’s Dance Workshop to make a video dance for broadcast.  Greenfield asked cinema verite pioneer filmmaker/cinematographer Richard Leacock to do camera. The theme: male/female interactions. They shot a clothed version for broadcast and a nude version for themselves.  WGBH found even the clothed version too raw for broadcast. When Leacock passed away in 2011, Greenfield  revisited the nude video dance footage, restored it on today’s technology,  and found in it a new concept of   timeless nude duets as moving image art:  BodySongs. Also among the films being screened:  MUSEic Of The BODy (2010), edited from Greenfield’s 1994 multimedia performance with video art pioneer Nam June Paik, for which she garnered a Best in The Arts in the New York Times (“ Nude attacks piano with long strand of pearls. Magical! Unforgettable!” Dunning);  the underground classic Element (“ Greenfield rolls and seethes and plunges in a field of mud, her hair, her face, her body not just slathered with it, but become part of it. I am impressed!”  Jowitt, Village Voice), and Wildfire  (“ An ode to the female body” Berlin Film Festival, “A surreal masterpiece, the beauty rises to the level of intoxication”, Williamsburg Film Festival). The dancers’ movements, transformed by virtuoso digital editing, channel  the 1894 Loie Fuller-esque first dance film, Thomas Edison’s   “Annabelle”. Greenfield and Haller will be present to answer questions and sign Flesh into Light at the reception following the screening. In celebrating Greenfield’s work, Flesh Into Light both articulates essential principles of  cine-dance through her films. They re-invent dance as fundamental human motion not just for the camera, but as and inseparable from cinema. “For Greenfield, the body moving with and against the close-up camera can be the concrete image of inner human nature, an instrument for its expression and a vessel containing images and actions that crystalize the meanings and mysteries of experience: movement and memory, the past and the present moment.”  Robert Haller, Flesh Into Light) Amy Greenfield is an internationally award-winning filmmaker/choreographer and performer. Cineaste Magazine calls her “the most important person making experimental film dance today.”  She is a pioneer of film/video dance. The Museum Of Modern Art in their Exhibition, Video Art A History cites her as having in the early ‘70s  “…developed a new form of video dance, choreographing for the video camera and television screen.” Her work has been screened in one-woman and group shows at the Museum Of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum Of American Art, The Kitchen Center, The Hayward Gallery, London, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC,(highlighted in “Cine dance In America”), at such festivals as Berlin,  Edinburgh, Dance On Camera/ Lincoln Center, Video Danza/ Buenos Aires, and winning awards at the Houston, Athens, London, American Film Festivals and more. Robert Haller is a major figure in the American avant-garde film scene. He founded the National Alliance Of Media Arts Centers and is now Director of Special Projects and Library Collections at Anthology Film Archives.  He has written books and catalogues on Fritz Lang, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Jim Davis and more. His photographs of avant-garde film-makers are now on view at the Albright Knox Gallery. He lectures on avant-garde cinema worldwide.