Movies: Barbara Sternberg

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 implication...

touch (ing), -(ed): Feel, move, affect, be in contact, tangent to, in relation; injure slightly; slightly crazy "My window tonight casts light out onto the snow, I cast from my eye a glance, a touchless touch.. Jorie Graham, "To 2040" We look. we tou...

Constructed with repetitions and variations, in reference to the musical form of a Nocturne, “Far From” is an accumulation of layers, a density of living, the noise of existence. Ghosts of lives lived and traces of lives being lived, rising....

“Shot in an abandoned warehouse, documenting a contemporary adaptation of the Oedipus story by a group of Toronto experimental filmmakers, Antigone is both a documentary about searching for meaning and validity in the old story, and a fiction about t...

Goethe’s colour theory dealt with the optics of colour relations; Rudolf Steiner’s and Kandinsky’s theories attribute emotional, musical, and spiritual affects to colour; North American Natives see personality traits and states of mind, seasons, race...

"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 ...

The day as it went along – feeling the light of the present…what else is there?...

Anything is Everything is composed of sequences of disparate footage, but with threads to follow: circular shapes from outer and terrestrial space; animals and humans; words and ideas. Stuttering, flickering, blinks and blanks set bits of time and sp...

Images flutter and flicker in orgasmic rhythms. Visual references to Bataille’s “solar anus”, to romantic coupling, to monkeys and man are held together within the sustaining dichotomy of beginnings and endings....

"Poetry, film, light, life. An excerpt from Rilke's Ninth Elegy [...] evokes the beauty and brevity of life. Images shimmer in an uncanny light. We catch glimpses only."...

Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating – emotions which conflict, confuse, are difficult to reconcile. The texts ‘speak’ unsaid and unsayable thoughts, impolitic or just impolite. Suppressed exclamations ...

Brief moments of being, fleeting bits of the surrounding chaos....

A mini-presentation of consciousness dealing with cosmos. The world in a grain of sand. Connections between life, death, and the world are neither static nor symmetrical but flowing and intuitive. The movement of emulsion through which images are see...

A bedroom (and life) viewed from the horizontal, while wondering whether to join in the race or wake up to the illusion. The soundtrack quotes from Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans on disillusionment....

Based loosely on the tripartite plan of Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), the film was made by applying cyanotype chemistry to blank film exposed to sun. The resultant blue and white footage was then combined with camera footage ...

There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose almost-not-there paintings dovetail with the space I find myself in at this stage of life: at the frontier between youth and ol...

"Your life is like a candle burning. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning." (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar)...

Ideas about how we live in the world as humans, the difficulties faced, the conditions of our brief existence, accompany us consciously or unconsciously, overtly or subliminally as we go about our daily lives. The video quotes images from art and fil...

Brief moments of being, fleeting bits out of the surrounding chaos. These 4 shorts films can be shown separately or one after the other on the roll....

Videoed off projected super 8 footage, this short film in four parts (titles from Artaud: “ the earth in the sea, the air in the earth, the fire in the water, the water in the air”) is suggestive of, on some level, the interrelatedness of everything....