Monday November 16 – Thursday November 19, 10:30pm PT
Jean Sousa
Where are we going?
Q&A with the artist via live chat at 8:45pm ET
Microscope is very pleased to present an online screening of works by Chicago-based artist and filmmaker Jean Sousa. The program includes eight short films made between 1977 and 1987 culled from Sousa’s expansive body of work — which also extends to photography and performance art — as well as her latest video “The Mermaid,” completed this year.
Sousa’s works, which she describes as revealing “a concern with the physical properties of the medium, text as a formal device, the question of female identity as it relates to common gender tropes, and the experimental possibilities of narrative,” employ various techniques and processes such as alterations in frame rate, inversion of color, animation, and the use of modified cameras. Movement is central to her work, especially that of the human body in space, as recorded by the camera and further deconstructed, analyzed, and reorganized through cinema.
In “The Circus” (1977), one of Sousa’s earliest works and originally shot at four frames per second on 8mm film, the customary acts of trapeze artists, weight lifters, tigers and their trainers are abstracted into the motions of radiant shapes slowly mutating with the shifting rhythms created by the artist through optical printing. In her 1978 film “Ellen on the Rope” the artist aims her camera at performer Ellen Fisher as she freely swings back and forth on a rope through a large empty studio. The feeling of complete liberation from our usual gravity-imposed range of movements pervades the film as Fisher’s body is thrust throughout the space, so infectious that the camera itself begins to pan wildly around, in a tribute of sorts to the independence from physical or assumed stylistic constraints. “Swish” (1982) goes even further, in “an attempt to get inside motion” through the shooting of a moving subject with an open shutter.
Other works such as “What Am I Doing Here” (1978) and “Spent Moments” (1984) grapple with social stereotypes, the artist’s own experience as a woman, as well as one’s sense of purpose and broader existential concerns. The title “Spent Moments” emphasizes the fact that the moments captured in the film — a woman’s daily activities in her house such as ironing, cleaning, cooking, taking a shower, all shot from corners of the rooms as though from the house’s perspective — have been used and cannot be used again. At once mysterious and familiar, thrilling and uneventful, dreamy and realistic, and scored by bursts of sound followed by silence, Sousa’s other black & white film “Today is Sunday” (1987) is instead focused on spare time. Text appears in titles superimposed over a bright, cloudy sky. As a female and male character idle in the glowing sunlight, the question appears: “Where are we going?”
A live Q&A with Sousa and the online audience via chat follows the screening at 8:45pm ET.
TO WATCH:
A “WATCH NOW” link will appear on this page on Monday November 16th at 7pm ET. Passes for viewing give full access to the video program and live chat.General admission $8 (Valid through Thursday November 19, 10:30pm ET)
Member admission $6 (Valid through Thursday November 19, 10:30pm ET)
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Chicago-based artist Jean Sousa has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and a Regional Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2014 and 2017. Awards include a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, the Cliff Dwellers Fellowship for Artist Residency at Ragdale, and a Professional Artist in Residence at Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan. Sousa’s films have been screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York, the London Filmmakers Cooperative, Collectif Jeune Cinéma in Paris, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Cinematheque in San Francisco, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago among other venues. Her films are in the Canyon Cinema Foundation Collection and were part of their 50th Anniversary Touring Program. They are also in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Film Study Collection and the Collectif Jeune Cinema in Paris, France. In the fall of 2019 she had a retrospective of her 16mm films and digital work at Chicago Filmmakers. Sousa has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and MIT Summer Institute for Film, Photography, and Video at Hampshire College.
Program:
Pattern Impulse
By Jean Sousa
16mm film, sound, 1979, 3 minutes
Originally this handmade film was a score for musicians to play. Each graphic symbol represents a particular instrument, establishing an image-sound relationship that combines and alternates to create a variety of rhythms and instrumentation. The sound track is from a recording of a live performance and reveals the anticipation of the performers.
Today is Sunday
By Jean Sousa
16mm film, sound, 1987, 18 minutes
Today is Sunday is both a still life and a landscape film in which the characters are described by nature. The clouds, the wind, the waves, articulate their presence. A dialogue is established between the external environment, the sound, the weather, and the internal musings of the female character.
Summer Medley
By Jean Sousa
8mm to 16mm film, sound, 1977, 5 minutes
An 8mm collection of footage from a summer vacation layered with a pair of dancing legs creates a puzzle where shapes add, subtract, and multiply in a medley of bold colors, horizontal movements, and simplified forms. Inspired by the early tape loop work of composer, Steve Reich, the film is constructed from four out-of-sync film loops that combine and recombine to form variations of changing images and an interplay of patterns and form.
Swish
By Jean Sousa
16mm film, silent, 1982, 3 minutes
Swish was made with a moving subject and a moving camera with an open shutter, the result being that each frame is a unique image. It is about the physical properties of the medium and pushing those distinctive features to their limit. The film is an attempt to get inside of motion and can be seen as a modern-day version of Futurist simultaneity. ‘Swish’ is also a camera movement.
What Am I Doing Here
By Jean Sousa
16mm film, silent, 1978, 14 minutes
“What Am I Doing Here” is a reworking of a performance that involved all the permutations of five words, five notes, and five movements. Through acting out of various scenarios from my private life, the film puts flesh on the bones of the performance. In the process, I am playing with narrative, enacting my fantasies, fears, and mundane realities in a personal journey through the questions and the endless attempts to answer them.
Ellen on the Rope
By Jean Sousa
16mm film, sound, 1978, 6 minutes
“Ellen on the Rope is an energetically expressive study of performer Ellen Fisher working out on the rope in her Lodge Hall rehearsal space, itself a handsome room of classical proportions and lighting. Sousa’s film studies Fisher’s strenuous activity from a series of vantage points, creating a strobing rhythm by crossing the camera’s shutter speed with the rate of the rope traversing its frame. Unlike other athletic film studies, usually focused on body properties or close-ups of muscular exertion, Ellen on the Rope directs our attention more towards physics, tracing the dynamics and energy of Ellen’s patterns through space with a camera that progresses from tripod stillness to sympathetic motion. A simple exercise, this film offers a fine example of two artists working out together on rope and celluloid.” — B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader, 1979
Spent Moments
By Jean Sousa
16mm film, silent, 1984, 10 minutes
An abstract narrative shot from the point of view of a house – the woman is seen from an angle of the wall, the corner observes her. This is a film about fleeting sensations in the midst of ordinary activities, the energy of heat, and the activity of the imagination.
“ …A mop swishes across an almost holy rectangle of white light, glowing on the kitchen floor. The rectangle leaps out like a projector-lit movie screen in darkness. As images of pen on paper, a woman seated by a typewriter, and games like the word ‘suspense’ followed by a film noir image of shadows and a lamp appear, one infers that Sousa is questioning not only the “spent moments” of the domestic life but of the creative life as well.” — Wendy Brabner, Spiral, 1984
The Circus
By Jean Sousa
8mm to 16mm film, sound, 1977, 6 minutes
“The Circus” is an experimental film that merges several of my interests – the physical properties of the medium, movement, performance, and the time and space of filmic representation – as a means to reconstruct reality. “The Circus” was originally shot in Regular 8 at four frames per second, transferred to 16 mm through optical printing, and printed on color negative which accounts for the rhythmic beat of the movement and the film’s brilliant hues.
“…Sousa begins with the footage of performers in the midst of their activities. She then alters the choreography (via optical printing and extensive processing) into a slower, sometimes nearly still, dance of colors and shapes freed of lifelike requirements. Her concern with physicality divides its targets equally between the performing bodies and the film within which they are activated. The Circus flattens the flamboyant action into graphic details, dissolving those details further into mere traces, striations of color, and the pure movement of film grain.” — B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader, 1979
The Mermaid
By Jean Sousa
Digital video, sound, 2020, 8 minutes
The focus of “The Mermaid” is women in 20th century America and the limited options available to them. An excerpt from an Adrienne Rich poem provides a narrative thread to the imagery and invites a feminist interpretation of the action. It is a commentary on beauty as agency in a ‘man’s world,’ with the arts and entertainment as areas where women were allowed entry, while at the same time raising the question of female identity and available role models that transcend common gender tropes. The performative element and the spectacle of the female body are the driving force of the film, and form the locus of the women’s strength and power, but are also the source of exploitation, limitation, and compromise. This film was commissioned by the Chicago Film Archive for their 2020 Media Mixer.
