OSCAR-NOMINATED DIRECTOR TO SCREEN TWO FILMS AT BMC

Oscar-nominated director Jill Godmilow will give a Bryn Mawr audience a sense of the development of her 30-year filmmaking career when she presents two of her films here on Monday, Nov. 22. She will screen her 58-minute 1974 documentary Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman as well as the 30-minute What Farocki Taught of 1998. The event, co-sponsored by the Program in Film Studies, the Department of English and the Center for Visual Culture, will take place in Thomas 110 at 8 p.m.

Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman is a biography of Antonia Brico, the first female symphony conductor in the world. In 1930, Brico became the first woman ever to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic. Hailed as a "girl genius," she went on to conduct the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony and The London Philharmonic. Antonia broke with the orthodoxy of the documentary genre by including animation, self-reflection and dramatically original editing. The first independently produced American documentary to enjoy widespread theater distribution, Antonia received an Academy Award nomination and the Independent New York Film Critics Award for Best Documentary. In December 2003, it was selected for inclusion and preservation in the National Registry of Film at the Library of Congress.

A DOW engineer and worker mixing up a test batch of Napalm in What Farocki Taught

The CEO's secretary at DOW Chemical, from What Farocki Taught

In What Farocki Taught, Godmilov recreates, frame by frame, the German filmmaker Harun Farocki's 1969 film essay on the production of Napalm, Inextinguishable Fire. "While it demonstrates the impossibility of resistance to Napalm's production by Dow Chemical employees and ultimately to its use by the U.S. military forces fighting in Vietnam," says Film Studies Director Jonathan Kahana, "Farocki's film is radical in technique, cooling the hot topic of terror down to frank, rational substance through Brechtian under-representation." Inextinguishable Fire was never distributed in the United States and is still unavailable to American viewers. Godmilow's re-creation of the film, in English, subverts conventions of authorship and distribution, while an epilogue commends Farocki's political stance and radical representational strategies to contemporary filmmakers facing new political situations.

Godmilov, a professor of film, television and theater at the University of Notre Dame, has earned a reputation as a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker. In addition to Antonia and What Farocki Taught, her films include Far From Poland (1984), an experimental feature documentary about the Polish Solidarity movement; Waiting for the Moon (1987), a fictional biography of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein that won first prize at the Sundance Film Festival; Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1995), a cinematic translation of performance artist Ron Vawter's extraordinary solo theater piece; and Lear '87 Archive (Condensed), a three-disc DVD work on Mabou Mines' gender-reversed production of King Lear. Godmilow is at work on a video opera about animals called This Longing.

<<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 11/18/2004

>>Next Story