Society for Photographic Education
43rd National Conference in Chicago

2006 SPE Women's Film Festival

Coordinated by Lynn Estomin

Three Award-Winning Women Filmmakers In-Person:

Lisa Barcy

Lisa Barcy is a Chicago-based maker of animated films, puppets and other sculptural oddities. Her films have been screened at such venues as The Gene Siskel Film Center, The Cleveland Museum of Modern Art, and festivals such as Slamdance, The Chicago Underground, The New York Underground, Indie Memphis, CinemaTexas, and The Black Maria. She has also made puppets for several Redmoon Theater productions including “The Cabinet,” the critically acclaimed adaptation of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, She is an assistant professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and plays a mean musical saw.

WOMAN WITHOUT A PAST
Directed by Lisa Barcy, 4 minutes, 2004
A stop-motion/collage animation created with romance novels found in thrift stores; a self-portrait of sorts, revealing nothing while exposing everything at the same time.

THE GUILT TRIP, OR THE VATICANS TAKE A HOLIDAY
Directed by Lisa Barcy, 14 minutes, 2004
In a dilapidated church, icons of Catholicism run amok, Jesus and Mary Magdalene steal away for an adventurous road trip, and the Pope tends his restless herd with an iron fist. Told with stop-motion animated puppets and mixed media, The Guilt Trip examines the notion that you can always leave, but you never really escape.

THE ORDOVICIANS
Directed by Lisa Barcy and Jim Trainor, 5 minutes, 2004
Yves Tanguy meets Busby Berkeley as small Sculpey forms are set into motion. Like an antiquated nature documentary set on Mars, The Ordovicians creates a landscape resplendent in weirdly twitching objects that all seem to get a long happily.

Daniéle Wilmouth

Daniéle Wilmouth works primarily in experimental and documentary filmmaking. In 1990 she began a six-year residency in Osaka, Japan, where she co-founded Hairless Films, an independent filmmaking collective. For more than 5 years she studied the Japanese contemporary dance form Butoh with several teachers including Katsura Kan. Her films have won awards and screened widely in festivals, museums and on television around the world. She is currently a faculty member in the film and video departments of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College.

TRACING A VEIN
Directed by Daniéle Wilmouth, Experimental, 15 minutes, 2001
An ecstatic ceremonial dance between performers and camera, Tracing a Vein charts the journey of an individual through the cycle of life. The film combines live action and stop motion camera work, with choreography influenced by Japanese Butoh dance. Drawing on a range of mythology and folklore, Tracing a Vein attempts to re-appropriate the spiritual power & sacred possibilities of ancient performance; to rediscover the performer as priest, warrior and healer.

“This isn’t dance on film, it’s film that dances. Like Muybridge, Wilmouth is interested in the weird science of movies, that conjures up a soul from the cinematic machine.” – Bill Brown, Filmmaker

ROUND
Directed by Daniéle Wilmouth and Hiroshi Mori-MacDonald. Sound composition by Lou Mallozzi.
Experimental, 11 minutes, 2002
ROUND explores analogue & digital myths of creation. In consultation with scientists, folklorists & theologians, we study the sterile white digital world of replication; a virtual breeding farm. Turbulent floods and disembodied hands sculpt figures with uncertain identities. Bodies roll chasing their own shadows in an infinite stream; a human race - questioning the danger - or benefit - of becoming a thing amongst the things we produce.

“ROUND examines the body in relation to technology and contemporary concerns of cloning… Individuality and identity are compromised, producing a tension between surface and representation where the body resonates as mere object.” – Trevor Martin, Curator, Betty Rymer Gallery

Mary Patten

Mary Patten is an interdisciplinary visual artist and video-maker. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the UCROSS Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at many venues across the U.S. and internationally in Zurich, Berlin, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Patten is drawn to collective and collaborative forms of art and cultural production to re-claim language, feeling, and political passions from fundamentalist thinking, and to articulate a utopia of the everyday that allows for anger, joy, and reparative visions. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

NEW WORK
Mary Patten will present selections from her current projects including Variations On Looking At A Blue Sky and Storyboard: Calling The Ghosts.

LETTERS, CONVERSATIONS: NEW YORK-CHICAGO, FALL, 2001
Directed by Mary Patten, 11 minutes, 2003
In snippets from e-mails, letters and haunting video footage, immediate reactions from late September 2001 are juxtaposed with still images and stories from Afghanistan, creating an eerie sense of distance and displacement in time, space and experience between Americans and Afghanis, reflecting on collective loss in the aftermath.

LETTER TO A MISSING WOMAN
Directed by Mary Patten, 4 minutes, 1999
Letter to a Missing Woman combines documentary "truth" and fiction in a letter to a "missing woman". Based partly on memories of someone who has been a fugitive for 17 years, and partly on an imaginary reconstruction, this "letter" examines public documents and private history in a kind of one-sided conversation across the space of many years, and a futile attempt to bridge two wildly divergent paths.

CLOSE READING (or, the mystery of the severed human leg)
Directed by Mary Patten, 2 minutes, 1996
Through the appropriation of newspaper and television reports on the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, Close Reading (or, the mystery of the severed human leg) reveals the spurious neutrality of the mainstream news media.