Sunday November 19 – Thursday November 23, 11pm PT
Home and Away
The Documentary & Avant-garde Films of Barbara Meter
Curated by Robin Roblee-Strauss
Works in original 16mm format
In person & online
Microscope is very pleased to present a rare screening of films by Dutch filmmaker Barbara Meter — a central figure of the experimental film scene in the Netherlands starting from the 1970s and co-founder of the influential avant-garde film venue “Electric Cinema” in Amsterdam — curated by Robin Roblee-Strauss. All the films in the 55-minute long program will be screened in their original format.
From the curator:
“Home and Away features one biographical documentary and four short avant-garde films by filmmaker, Barbara Meter.
As one of the first women to study at the Netherlands Film Academy in the 1960s and co-founder of Amsterdam’s “Electric Cinema,” a bastion of avant-garde film and ideas in the 1970s, Barbara has been a pioneer in the production and promotion of experimental filmmaking in the Netherlands.
In a 1971 interview, Barbara describes her work as “pure films,” conveying “thoughts and feelings by pure movement, a pure image that may flicker or be blurred, and by intervening in the process of developing and printing the film.” Through her innovative use of optical printing methods, she seamlessly massages, and reworks found sounds and images: combining them with her personal archive. She remolds these documents into distinct, deeply personal sense worlds.
This program showcases a range of works made throughout Barbara’s artistic career which echo deep psychological themes tied to the destabilizing effects the Second World War wrought on her family life and personal sense of home. Her notion of “wanting to belong to something you can’t reach” is explored prismatically in this film program by showing a biographical documentary work which explore her family’s history during WWII alongside experimental films that represent the universal feelings of yearning to belong, the pain of separation, the distance felt in estrangement, and the joy of homecomings.
Throughout Barbara’s life she has continued to create work, program screenings, and teach and lecture on film. Her work has been shown at Rotterdam Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Tate Gallery London, Cinematheque San Francisco, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City among many other venues in Europe. Home and Away is the first solo exhibition that combines her experimental work alongside her documentaries and the second solo exhibition of her films in North America.”
Curator Roblee-Strauss will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening.
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Barbara Meter (Netherlands, b. 1939) co-founded the Electric Cinema in the early 1970s in Amsterdam, in need of a critical response to the commercialization of film production and programming. Run by members of the Dutch Filmmakers’ Coop, and STOFF (the Studio for the Development of Film and Film Manifestations), the theater became the epicenter of Dutch independent and avant-garde filmmaking. At the Electric Cinema, Meter curated international avant-garde and expanded cinema programs. After that, she co-created POLKIN (Political Kinema) and made documentaries as part of activist and feminist movements. — Via Light Cone
Guest curator Robin Roblee-Strauss is a lebenskünstler — a life-artist! Born and raised in the woodlands of Western Massachusetts. he has always gravitated towards filmmaking as an approach to research that combines scholarly investigation with artistic expression. At Hampshire College he studied non-fiction & experimental film, psychology, and critical disability studies. Robin has assisted several experimental filmmakers including Abraham Ravett, Barbara Meter, Ansuya Blom, and Abigail Child. He worked at Anthill Sound Design in the Netherlands as a sound editor and most recently as a research assistant on an archival documentary series directed by Luke Meyer. Curation is a new facet of his practice motivated by his investment in the haptic qualities of sound and the moving image works as a way to communicate through the senses — articulating alternative ways of knowing.
Program:
From The Exterior
16mm film, color, silent, 1970, 9 minutes
A nocturnal view of existences left to themselves, seen from the other side. A handheld camera peers covertly through open-curtained windows, overlapping lives: faces, silhouetted figures, rouge lampshades, houseplants, blinking TV sets, cigarettes, poodles, and amber orbs – unobtrusive fragments of an evening spent at home.
Up To The Sky, And Much Much More
Video, color, sound, 2015, 36 minutes
Barbara Meter tells the life story of her father Leo Meter, using slides, photographs, drawings, and the letters her father wrote to her after being arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Eastern Front. Barbara Meter reflects, “There are not many testimonies from Germans who resisted fascism – my father was one of them, and I could tell it. So, I dug up what I found of him – photos, letters, drawings, stories – and recorded it. During the making of the film, I felt that step by step I came closer to who he had been, and also closer to the love and protection I experienced from him – even if I was too little to remember his presence clearly. In Poland, I was very close to where he had died. There were only empty fields of grain and old broken houses … such an estranged feeling that there were no signs left of the cruel fighting that had happened there. For myself, this gap has been filled, and I hope for some others too.”
Convalescing
16mm film (from super 8), color, silent, 2000, 3 minutes
Confined to a room, one reads, looks, and listens. In these moments of distance from the world, Barbara Meter considers “the blue, the light of the television, the blue, the book, the patterns, the light, the blue. Time to appreciate how much that really is.”
Quay
16mm film, color, sound, 2003, 4 minutes
A study of arrivals, maritime comings and goings: vessels dock, sailors throw ropes, drop anchor, and people poised on platforms await friends or families. Then the choreography of reunions begins. Barbara writes: “Arriving at an island is a joy forever. The magic of ships when they dock, the expectation on the quays, the exciting theatre of the people with and without their vehicles, the saying hello and goodbye are everyday experiences on the Greek islands.”
Ariadne
16mm film, color, sound, 2004, 12 minutes
A haptic hymn to longing restlessness and desire – movement of the wheels, a spool of string, sprockets, feet, and hands suggests cycles of renewal and reinvention. An anonymous woman– could it be Ariadne who gave Theseus the thread to find his way out of the labyrinth? Or perhaps one of the ancient fates spinning the yarn of destiny…
TRT: 55 minutes
