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Breaking the Frame

Marielle Nitoslawska

2012 01:40:00 CanadaEnglishStereo16:9Film
Tags:
Artist Portraits, Documentary, Documentation, Feature Length, Performance

Description

Marielle Nitoslawska’s Breaking the Frame is a feature–length profile of the radical New York artist Carolee Schneemann. A pioneer of performance art and avant-garde cinema, Schneemann has been breaking the frames of the art world for five decades by challenging the taboos leveled against the female body. Breaking the Frame is a kinetic, hyper-cinematic intervention, a critical medita-tion on the intimate correlations animating art and life.

 

Praise for Breaking the Frame:

 

A work about a formidable artist that is itself an important work of art.

– Mark McElhatten, Views from the Avant-Garde, New York Film Festival.

Breaking the Frame plunges you into Ms. Schneemann’s past and present with few of the usual documentary signposts.

– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times.

Director Marielle Nitoslawska's faith in the power of imagery over pedantic expo-sition rewards the audience with a heady catalogue of Schneemann's luscious paintings, visceral hand-illustrated journals and excerpts from her corporeal films. Nitoslawska achieves her own form of engaging delirium by marrying her kaleidoscopic footage with overlapping conversations and a musical score by the avant-garde composer James Tenney.

– R.C. Baker, The Village Voice.

 Nitoslawska deserves special credit for the way her film is about more than the artist’s oeuvre and impact without resorting to mawkish biography.

– David Cohen, ARTCRITICAL.

Elliptical in its account, Breaking the Frame rhymes with the sensual quality of Schneeman's own body of work, framed as revelatory.

– Artspace: New Art Documentaries to Watch in 2014

Moving trains, changing seasons and Schneemann’s cat on the windowsill, watching, always watching, advance like stepping-stones along a symbolic laby-rinth, navigating Schneemann’s art and life.

– Joyce Beckenstein, The Brooklyn Rail

 The effect is haunting and hallucinatory, particularly when viewed in the dark of a cinema.

– Iain Millar, The Art Newspaper.

Nitoslawska crafted a total artwork evoking an epochal tonality. Breaking the Frame functions as an amalgamation of poem, dream journal, photo album, labor-atory log, cultural memento, archeological dig, and liberation manual for an era of artistic experimentation and confrontation. In short, it is as much a cultural time capsule as a biographical testament.

– G. Roger Denson, Huffington Post.

About Marielle Nitoslawska

Marielle Nitoslawska, born in Canada, is a filmmaker, cinematographer and film professor who lives and works in Montreal. She received her B.F.A. in Studio Arts and Art History from Concordia University, Montreal and an M.F.A., magna cum laude in Cinematography from the Polish National Film School in Lodz. She remained in Poland for a decade, working as a filmmaker during the social and cultural upheavals that led to the fall of that country’s communist government. There, she shot numerous exploratory ethnographic films in 35mm and actively participated in the underground media arts movement in Lodz, with friends and mentors from the Workshop of Film Form.

Nitoslawska has made numerous film essays, both feature length and short form on ground-breaking movements and artists such as Domingo Cisneros, Szczepan Mucha, Jozef Robakowski, and Carolee Schneemann. Poetic and unconventional, her films explore the ideas behind the work of these artists and their contemporary significance. Her films have received critical acclaim and extensive festival play, and include Bad Girl (2002), a groundbreaking documentary investigating explicit representations of female sexuality; Sky Bones (1999, nominated for Best Art Doc, Hot Docs); and Choices: An Artist From Eastern Europe Speaks Out (1987), included in the National Gallery of Canada’s permanent collection. Her work is defined by an experimental approach to structure and explorations into narrative and representation.

She has also collaborated widely as an award-winning cinematographer on documentary, experimental and fiction films for a variety of directors. Her work has exhibited internationally at museums, art institutions, galleries, biennials and film festivals, including the National Gallery of Canada, Musée du Québec, WRO Biennale (Poland), Goethe-Institut New York, Vancouver Film Festival, Hot Docs, INPUT, FIFA, and the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.

Nitoslawska served as Chair of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University from 2009-2012. In 2006 she received the Faculty of Fine Arts Distinguished Teaching Award. She directs the Possible Movements Lab, a research group in experimental documentary, at Concordia’s Hexagram Institute for Media Arts.