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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
CIRCULATING FILM AND VIDEO LIBRARY
Donna Cameron
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“Donna Cameron is one of the most significant new presences in non-narrative cinema, in cameraless cinema, in New York Independent cinema, in American avant-garde cinema, and in poetic meditative cinema” Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator of Film & Media, MoMA
"Donna Cameron is an artist whose vigorous presence in New York has contributed significantly to making it the vital center of the independent film movement. Her curiosity is widespread. ... She's also a painter, writer, photographer, etc., etc. Nothing is safe, neither people nor objects, from the creative appetite of Donna Cameron. If nothing else, I treasure her because she made a film about one of our most important independent artists - a woman I adored –Shirley Clarke.
"Donna works with memory, feelings, poetry, texture, and follows her intuition, as well as with technique and formal invention. If Donna can't make something one way, she'll just find another. In a way she's a chameleon: All styles are fair game. But, at the core, there's always a moral center. I hope she continues to stay here in New York to nudge us - to push us to our limits. ... ” - Adrienne Mancia, international curator-at-large, Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY
Donna Cameron is the author of an extensive body of work which includes oil paintings,
watercolors, photos, films, videos and CD-ROMs, and has been an exhibiting visual artist since 1970. Her paper emulsion films have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art,
NY Dept. of Film & Media (1990-CURRENT). Her current installation work explores the
relationship of the traditional image to the digital frame, and the function of an image
within the framework of inter-media. She has been an educator since 1969, and has
taught and lectured at NYU (1992-CURRENT) and the School of Visual Arts, NY (1998-2000).
“I explore film as a visual artist as opposed to as a commercial producer. I feel that film and painting are mediums which are similar in that creating with them, the artist builds up the image - in film with the frame, in painting with the brush stroke - to record a moment in space and time. ” –Donna Cameron
THE FILMS OF DONNA CAMERON
1979-2005
"Donna Cameron attended the Rhode Island School of Design and received a BFA degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied painting, photography and filmmaking. She wrote stories and produced photo essays about people on the Florida Keys for the Miami Herald, and continued her studies in painting and drawing in Paris in the early eighties. ... [H]er paintings, photographs and films have been exhibited nationwide." - Cineprobe program notes, The Museum of Modern Art, NY
“...Cameron has been working in paper emulsion...The result is a series of vibrant sensual films reprocessing such familiar imagery as the Brooklyn Bridge or paper money.” Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
“Her sensual free flowing visual and aural collages creatively superimpose memories, poetry, color light, sound and music. The paper emulsion process which she developed in 1974 lends a unique personal texture to her imagery.” - John Canemaker, 2006 Academy Award winning animator
Cameron is the 1998-1999 Elodie Osborne Fellow of Film & Video, and has been awarded
three MacDowell fellowships (1997, 1998, and 1999) and two Jerome fellowships (1988, 1992)
for her imaging work in painting & drawing on film. Her work is distributed by the MoMA
Circulating Film & Video Library, which is THE library used by film scholars worldwide, and
is in included in collections at NYU (1995); Anthology Film Archives (1981); Pacific Film
Archive (1991); The Donnell Library (1998), and Fordham University (2000). Cameron has
collaborated with filmmaker Shirley Clarke (1987), performance artist Jack Smith (1985-6),
dancer/choreographers Oleo Pomare (1996) and Nanette Bearden (1996), with musicians
Don Militello (1991,1996), Mark Stewart (2003), Fred Kaufman (1997), Barbara Siesel (1995,97),
painter Dr. Vivienne Thaul-Wechter (1995-2000) and others. She was included in the MoMA's
20th century retrospective of visual art, "MoMA 2000, Making Choices, Part 2", in June, 2000,
and the 20th century retrospective, “The Color of Ritual, The Color of Thought: Women in
Avante-Garde Film in America", 1944-2000, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, in
September, 2000.
In January, 2001, The United States Patent and trademark Office awarded Cameron an
International Patent Allowance for her invention: "Cinematic Paper Emulsion".
Donna Cameron is the recipient of many scholarships and is internationally educated.
Cinematic Paper Emulsion Films
Newsw.
1979. By Donna Cameron. 6 min. Color. Silent.
16mm/VHS/min-DV A film made from the January 1, 1979 issue of Newsweek magazine and from handmade, organic papers and fibers - cotton, linen, rice, etc. The news is rolled out at you, with increasing speed (God help you if you don't remember what they said); the film itself is like the flipping of pages. The news - nonsense, organic fibers, and all - is thrown out-of-focus and off-the-screen.
1978-1980, 16mm, color/si, 9m
Unicorn
A film shot in the USA and Europe concerning myth as geographic time. The unicorn is a symbol of transformation, becomes frame-of-vision reference for a small boy and a young man. The magic of this imaginary beast transforms the man, but eluding the child, remains elemental and untamed.
1985, 16mm, color/si, 20m,
End
A film composed of an unused end of NEW MOON and printed to work visually with a segment of J.S. Bach's Suite in G Minor for Lute.
1985-1986, 16mm, color/so, 5m
Dracula and the Babysitter
A red psychodrama about gambling. This found footage film, originally made by the Mormons as a morality film in the 1950s, has been re-edited to create a surreal world through which the characters pass in a trance-like state. The film exploits the original found object's faded emulsion, which is red; a hellish nightmare emerges.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 14m,
The Chinese Lunch
A melange of found footage edited to reassemble, in its frayed images and scratchy soundtrack, an old newsreel. It is concerned with the vulnerability of the persons photographed and the ease with which commercial editing exploits and presents both men and women as robotoids and life as a game which only a football or a coconut can win. Within minutes the characters lose their identities and the film begins talking with itself, as if lived and fought between the splices, among its pieces, behind the images themselves.
1980-1987, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m,
New Moon
Second in a series of paper films made from strips of color Xerography. In these films, the filmmaker is concerned with the film as an object or motion picture "soft sculpture" constructed of 16mm-sized strips. The paper (or emulsion) could be a kind of skin complete with hair and pores, half-tone dots, paper fiber - through which the world is viewed.
1983-1987, 16mm, color/si, 11m
The Falcon
A red camp film. The desert is for the birds? Surreal, but real. Originally shot in the '60s in Kuwait, this story of falconry has been rephotographed, re-recorded and re-edited to bring the sad zaniness of sport to the screen, in livid color.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 13m,
The Super Weapon
A film poem shot in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Huntsville, Alabama and New York City in which missiles, bricks, huts, humanoid-types and people emerge from civilization's whimsical debris. The Apocalypse - now and after. The bomb is in YOU.
1987, 16mm, color/si, 14m,
Fauve.
1991. By Donna Cameron. Music by Peter Wetzler. 10 min. Color.
FAUVE is a paper film made by a unique paper process which I invented and have employed here as a monochromatic study of rhythm and mood and the physics of light waves leaving a source - one sees the red, or longest waves, first, the blue, or shortest waves, last, and in my film, one's left in the UV light world of peripheral vision. The original score by Peter Wetzler adds to the textural, tactile, visual experience of FAUVE.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 10m,
16mm/VHS “Not having the resources to make films didn’t stop Donna Cameron- she just invented a new way of doing them.” Tony Lucia, Reading Eagle
Tyger Tyger
"TYGER TYGER and FAUVE are paper emulsion films made from everyday objects, photos and photographic studies of New York City. The paper emulsion film is a process of film making which I developed in 1978, and which I have been using and improving since. I think of these films as symphonic, or pictorially musical. ... The structure itself is a carefully constructed three-dimensional, multi-layered collage. The various papers, objects, pieces of photos which comprise the 'emulsion' are sandwiched between (a) clear tape strips, (b) paper strips treated with SIAB (a Kodak chemical that makes paper transparent and increases resiliency), or (c) layered between pieces of other objects.
"In TYGER TYGER, a 40-minute paper film portrait of New York City, I explore the possibility of film as a geofactive medium. ... This imagined place, filmic New York, exists. It is tactile and energetic. This is a result of the physical nature of this film. There are no frame lines in the original film. These 16mm sized soft sculptures are visual rhythm strips. The frame line or meter is imposed upon, and then recorded from, the original film object by me and by my camera (or printer)." - From notes by the filmmaker
1990, 16mm, color/so, 40m,
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $80 Other
Donna Cameron at Work.
1991. Photographed, edited by Mike Kuchar. 10 min. Color. Sound.
VHS
“Donna, here, has invented her own film stock. When you can’t afford Kodak’s inflated prices, what could be more obnoxious than coming up with your own film stock?” George Kuchar, filmmaker.
Autumn Leaves.
1994. By Donna Cameron. Music by Gian Andrea Tabacchi. 5.5 min. Color.
16mm/VHS
“It’s the last telephone call from my youngest sister that echoes now and then and always- found by a stranger in a wood, her head fallen from its trunk, her beautiful face decomposed in a pile of dead leaves.” Donna Cameron
“I noted what was profound music about one of nature’s (to science) most profound relationships: that between order and disorder. It was a most entropic film. Clearly entropy defines the most probable direction of change.” Dr. D.P. Cameron, scientist.
Il Etait Une Fois.
1992. By Donna Cameron. Music by trans-Amn Street Jam. 28 min. Color.
16mm/VHS/min-DV
Canvas
CANVAS is an enclosure, as is any body of painting. It engages the act of painting: movement, gesture, pigment, orientation, space and the act of filming. The frames are the accruence of pigment, oils, dyes, gesso, applied with brushes, knives and hands to the surface. The surface, or emulsion, is either my own paper emulsion or commercial Kodak emulsion and has been treated to represent open-weave linen. To my sensibility, the screen, either film or video, or the canvas, are synonymous - they are the medium through which the image passes.
1995, VHS, color/so, 22m,
Dragon
The music in DRAGON is an excerpt from "La Reine Verte" by French avant-garde composer/musician Pierre Henry. This track is courtesy of Polygram Special Markets. The dragon motif has always been an essential one in humankind's attempt to liberate itself from the struggle between good and evil.
The film DRAGON is such a representation. Light, in the form of fire, is freed from darkness, in the form of the film's frameline. Life (a gargantuan plant) weaves its tangled web around the living (children performing the chore of shoveling snow). Death (the dragon) is omni-present, an angel at once visible and invisible. In the end the conscious (the film image) is liberated from the unconscious (the soundtrack) and the departed soul achieves immortality in the cycle of the ring of fire.
DRAGON was shot and solarized on ECO (Ektachrome Commercial Reversal Film) a decade after Kodak discontinued it. This extinct filmstock had a capacity for rendering subtle tones and definition as yet unparalleled.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 10m,
Mosaic Garden
1996, 16mm, color/so, 6m,
Die Honigbiene: A New Technology Film
Music: Pierre Henry, track courtesy of Polygram Special Markets
Processes: Painting and drawing; step optical printing & re-photography; Arriflex & Bolex cinematography; computer post-production of two separately edited 16mm films, including palette.
A new technology film about bee, honey and keeper. "Documenting the natural evolution of a bee - from larvae to pollinator. Poetically representing orange, blossom honey in the paper-like cells of the hive. A metaphor for creative process." - Ann Arbor Film Festival Notes
1997, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 8.5m,
Mobius I/Honigbiene II
A diptych. Filmically, digitally, texturally, this light painting celebrates four seasons, especially, the coming of spring.
1997, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 8m,
The Clown: A New Technology Film
Music: Charles Mingus; Voice: Jean Sheperton, track courtesy of Warner Special Products.
Processes: Painting and drawing; step optical printing; computer post-production; 35mm reduction.
The clown is set into motion by two unidentified persons lurking behind it, in the shadows. Oblivious, the clown embarks on its metaphoric life journey. The clown is only successful when a series of calamities bring about is demise, and ultimately, his death.
1998, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 13m,
World trade Alphabet.
2000. By Donna Cameron. 4.5 min. Color. Silent.
Supported by a MacDowell fellowship.
World trade Alphabet Film
MATERIALS: OIL, CHARCOAL, INK ON PAPER EMULSION*, ON 35MM FILM
Process: Film begins with primitive carving into handmade paper emulsion of ancient cuneiform glyphs, evolves into painting and drawing of glyphs, them floating type, using digital print-out of helvetica type and concludes with multi-material words: World trade Alphabet.
PLEASE NOTE: NO "LETtrASET" WAS USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS FILM: ALL HELVETICA TYPE AND IT'S FILMIC FLOW WAS DESIGNED, KERNED AND DIGITALLY OFFSET ACETATE BY THE FILMMAKER.
Theme: A Visual Meditation on the evolution of the alphabet which we use, it's origins in ancient Phoenicia, and the fact that it was invented as a shorthand from 360+ character cuneiform to better the efficiency of communication in ancient international world trade. Made at the MacDowell Colony. Purchase, 2001, the Museum of Modern Art Film Archive.
ExhibIted: Gulf & Western Gallery, NYU, NY; Exit Art, The Third World, NYC, NY; Anthology Film Archives; Art Vanguard Gallery, NY.
16mm/VHS/min-DV
Jazz Elegy.
2001. By Donna Cameron. Music by Mark Stewart. Voice: Andrew Sloan. 10 min. Color. Supported by a MacDowell fellowship.
16mm/VHS/min-DV
“Very often these experiments fit in with an artist’s investigation of trhe boundaries of vision and the essence of an image...Like Brakhage, she asks her audiences too see her photographic images in unconventional ways. The paper and its origins play a large role in this effort.” Maureen Furness, author, Expereimantal Animation
Peterborough Forest.
2001. By Donna Cameron. Music by Andrew Sloan. 4.5 min. Color.
Supported by a MacDowell fellowship.
16mm/VHS/min-DV
transpo.
1993-2003. By Donna Cameron. With Andrew Sloan as the child; Dominic Angerame, Mike Kuchar, Rene Broussard and Phil Sloan as fellow travelers. 28 min. Color. Sound. Funded by a Jerome Foundation Grant.
16mm/VHS/min-DV
Projector’
Music: Mark Stewart; Voice: Andrew Sloan.
Exhibited: MoMA Premieres, NY, January 2005
Portrait of a Kodak Pageant Projector a vital open load filmmaking tool which is no longer manufactured.
2005, mini- dv; 16mm, b&w/color/so, 5m
Live Reel
Music: Mark Stewart. Drums: David Cossin.
Exhibited: New York Filmmakers CoOp Benefit, NY, 2005
Cinematic Paper Emuslion lyric visual poetry reel for live concert. Includes 16mm prints of:
Brokn Bridge, Jazz Study, World trade Alphabet, Peterborough Forest.
2005, mini- dv; 16mm, silent/color, 4 5m works, 20 minutes trT.
Documentary Works
“The remarkable thing is... her sensivity to the rapid flow of textures...Cameron’s technique has evolved into a form of highly sculptural motion picture painting”- Helen Knode, LA Weekly
Shirley Clarke In Our Time.
1988-1993. Directed by Donna Cameron. With Shirley Clarke. 60 min. Color. Sound. Screened in “Making Choices”, the MoMA 2000 Centennial Exhibition.
DVD/VHS/min-DV Rental: $100. All Leases: Apply.
“In this moving tribute to her friend and colleague Shirley Clarke, Cameron brilliantly uses collage to fashion a focused but dizzying trip through “...Our Time” while creating a personal, affectionate portrait of Clarke. The home movies of Shirley Clarke’s childhood are the idyllic center of this piece, whereas the world Cameron constructs from found footage and literally wraps around this material is a disruptive and frightening one.
NYC/Joshua tree.
1991. Directed by Donna Cameron. Music by Don Militello. 15 min. Color.
16 mm film
Award: Winner, Juror's Choice Honors, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1995
Confidential: Do Not Duplicate
In CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DUPLICATE, which is a personal documentary/meditation on the death of her sister, she describes the film as "what one feels, having to survive a loved one who is violently murdered, whose body is found with nothing to identify it but teeth and fingerprints." It is deliberately filmed as a home video and incorporates the familiar elemental sounds and sights (wind, water, traffic) into the picture and dialogue, alluding to the many levels on which a person is affected by such as tragedy.
"CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DUPLICATE is a powerful and moving experience. In my general understanding the artist works alone and rarely achieves any level of synergy with the sum total of all the aims of an exhibit.
"Your work superseded our general expectations for the show. It surprised and astounded many of us with its Chills of truth. It's time we got back on track in the context of Art and Content. Bravery, fortitude, generosity and wisdom are important values to share with the art public ....
"Rationally, the very personal topic of the death of a loved one is a difficult subject for one to image in a work of fine art. It is obvious to me that you succeeded, with grace. Thank you for sharing this with us." - Charles Mingus III, Artist-Curator, "Reflections: A Legacy Unearthed, Discovery of the Duane St. Burial Site," New York
1991, VHS, color/so,
Il Etait une Fois (Once Upon a Time)
(ONCE UPON A TIME) is an abstract comic book in film form. The paper emulsion is made of French comics which I collected while I lived in Paris, France. Many of the papers were arranged to age and yellow for up to ten years, allowing for the eerie pale yellow light in much of the film.
When I lived in Paris, I lived across the street from the Musée Cluny. I went there almost every day, and was struck by the oldness of all the things exhibited there, especially the manuscripts and the stone sculptures and crypts. There was something in the light and the quietude there that was vital to my development as an artist, and it has stayed with me to this day.
In this film, by daily collecting and processing the paper, and then by leaving it aside to age, and then years later returning to print and record it, I have captured, in the image, and the quality of the images, the light that followed me into the Musée Cluny, that exists in that time and place.
In its romancing of the lens, the film voice is backed by contemporary keyboard music. With music by trans-Am.
1992, 16mm, color/so, 40m,
Autumn Leaves
The splendor and pleasures of Autumn are the focus of this richly textured and brilliantly colored paper emulsion film. The sound is a recording of the filmmaker ripping, rustling and tearing various kinds of paper. These sounds have been synthesized and musically arranged to echo the imaging of the synthesis paper. A reel of paper and fallen leaves unwinds amid calls of birds and the laughter of delighted children.
"Donna Cameron's work crosses the boundaries of film and painting. Her paper emulsion films are made via a process closer to assemblage than photography and draw attention to the sensuous properties of the celluloid medium." - Richard Herskowitz, Newsletter of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY
"Donna Cameron is a diehard New Yorker whose art mirrors that city's pulse." - Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun-Times
"Brooklyn native Donna Cameron's films are warm, humorous and well crafted. ... The remarkable thing about her [work] is her sensitivity to the rapid flow of textures. ... Cameron's technique has evolved into a highly sculptural motion picture painting." - Helen Knode, LA Weekly
Award: Winner, Juror's Citation Honors, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1995
1994, 16mm, color/so, 6m,
Mother’s Prayer.
1994. Directed by Donna Cameron. 10 min. Color. Music: Mahalia Jackson, Courtesy of the Estate of Mahalia Jackson. 16 mm/VHS
A portrait of an African-American dancer’s debut at Lincoln Center with the Nanette Bearden Dance Theater.
Selected to represent the New York Film/Video Council at their 50th Anniversary Screening, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996.
Thunderbolt: Conversations with Dr. Vivienne Thaul Wechter. 1995-2000. Directed by Donna Cameron. With Vivienne Wechter. 40 min. Color. Music: Peter Wetzler. Screened in :Cineprobe Series, the MoMA 2000.
DVD/VHS/min-DV
“An engaging record of the great New York artist, poet, and innovative educator- Vivienne Wechter.” The Observer, review, 2001
“A very accomplished work!” George Stoney, filmmaker; Professor Emeritus, Maurica Kanbar Institute of Film, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
“’Thunderbolt’ is aptly named…” –Town & City, review, 2000
The Orensanz Portfolio
2005. Directed, edited by Donna Cameron. Produced by the Angel Orensanz. Foundation Center for the Arts. Music by Ikue Mori. 51 min. Color.
DVD/Mini-DV/VHS
Exhibited: , June- October 2005
donna_cameron_bio.doc
web site Donna Cameron
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/authors/DonnaCameron.htm
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