Barbara Sternberg

  • Barbara Sternberg – Tending Towards the Horizontal (1989)

    1981-1990Barbara SternbergCanadaExperimental

    Quote:
    The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a library who reads only what others have left behind. The filmed images are predominantly houses: houses seen in passing, along the horizontal; houses reflecting sky and trees in their windows; houses partially hidden by trees or the shadows they cast; houses and office towers simultaneously pictured in stages of demolition and construction.Read More »

  • Barbara Sternberg – Beating (1995)

    1991-2000Barbara SternbergCanadaExperimental

    Quote:
    “Beating” — to get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts… Under this central trope of ‘beating’, with its combined negative and positive implications, the film brings together the individual personally lived and the communal, historic perspective; hatred and forgiveness; laughing and crying. Also brought in relation: the politics of gender and the holocaust; the Old World and North America. Passages of emotion – our lives as we experience them today – move through a terrain of memory and anlaysis.Read More »

  • Barbara Sternberg – Like a Dream That Vanishes (1999)

    1991-2000Barbara SternbergCanadaDocumentaryExperimental

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    “Like a Dream That Vanishes” continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses. (Your life is like a candle burning.) Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.Read More »

  • Barbara Sternberg – Transitions (1982)

    1981-1990Barbara SternbergCanadaDocumentaryExperimental

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    “Transitions” is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being between – between falling asleep and being awake, between here and there, between being and non-being. These metaphysical themes are evoked by the central image of a woman in white over which layers of images and sound (voices) are superimposed.Read More »

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