EveryDay3_Sternberg_Square_Times-6-B

Barbara Sternberg
EVERY DAY 3



Film <—> Life
My work comes from an interest in where film intersects with living…

Film is a time/light medium. With these essential properties
film is tied to human experience of life, our perception of it – vision/
visionary. Light has many connotations: perception, illumination,
awareness, spirit, and light as pure energy.
Film as a field of radiating energy particles.
There is kinetic energy in camera movement, bodies moving, and from
the movement of light. Film has kinaesthetic force; we feel a film.
Motion, rhythm, accents, tensions.
Rhythm in camera work and editing are expressions of the body.
Film as body; body as knower.
In editing, one’s body’s rhythm, one’s breath is externalized.
Rhythm as an expression of Being.

Film’s temporal nature reflects the fleeting nature of life, but film
can also give momentary experiences of the the eternal – ephemeral and
eternal. The still core of existence within the fleeting. The Is-ness of the
world. HERE IT IS.
In editing, disparate bits of time and space are juxtaposed.
Editing based on rhythm and colour allows for correlations to be
experienced between seemingly diverse subjects. In editing, image
to image relations, image to sound, and image to language are in
play creating meaning and emotion, shifting dynamics. Making an
(experimental) film is choreographing, orchestrating, and writing a
poem all in one!
If narrative film is like the novel, and documentary like the essay, then
I would say that experimental film is most similar to poetry: elliptical,
rhythmical, juxtaposing images, forging relations which make strange
the familiar, with a variety of forms, lengths, shapes…Each film
creates its own world or language with its own rules.

I find in my early films the seeds of much subsequent work.
Layers of reality, layers of consciousness, time circling back on itself -
layers of sediment.
I can sum up my aesthetic position in three words: daily, observational,
messy. I don’t go for the monumental. I film what’s around. I tend
to work against the glossy surface, to mess it up. Perfection seems a
barrier. I take an observational stance, more a glance than a studied
gaze, more hinted at than seen directly.
The world is not ours to hold on to.

I’m interested in transitional times and spaces – betweens:
between awake and asleep, between here and there, now and then,
between the historical and the personal, between me and us and them.
Borders, twilight, wonder, ambiguity.
I work with images bodily, suggestively, between abstraction and
representation, between blurred and distinct, between thinking and
feeling. When images are emptied of meaning, they approach Being.
I work with film’s emulsion – the image’s seeming solidity revealing
its reality as emulsion.
Reality/Illusion
Questions of reality and illusion have been part of the history of film
from its beginnings: film as a construct and film’s bond with reality
because of it’s photographicness. I want meaning to come not only
from the subject filmed but from the way the subject is shot and how
the film is put together. Form as content. Film as experience.

Repetition is a principle in life. Repetition is a principle in
film. Film, like life, needs repetition, but with slight differences, for
recognition and for structure; has past (memory), future (expectations),
and the impress of presence.
Repeated use of an image can operate as a symbol or motif, a rhythmic
feature, tonic note, or patterning device. Repetition can ritualize the
gesture depicted. Removed from its original context or continuity
of images, its meaning is liberated, it can become pure gesture,
self-­referential, fluid, its significance enhanced. (At the same time, no
repetition is possible – Gertrude Stein’s “insistence” versus “repetition”)
I use images from my own archive of footage – “found footage” found
close to home. Images that have iconic power for me (waves splashing,
flames flickering, birds’ wings flapping, a woman swimming underwater,
a boy running and falling, …) re-appear in my films. Images are flexible,
ambiguous, multi-valent, allowing for multiple readings.
Everything is related – and relative. Equivalences.

Memory and history are inherent to film itself, a medium in
time, that builds meaning through repetition and the requirements of
memory. Dust particles and scratches attest to it’s passage, its material
history; scars and wrinkles to ours.
Can I or film exist solely in the present?
Film suits dealing with pastness, but also, as a temporal medium,
with suspense, movement, flux, difference, rhythm. Everything has its
rhythms …
Film in itself is an experience of duration and perception.

Memory is held in the body and in the workings of the mind.
Film calls upon and calls forth both.
In the age of photography, our formation of memories is to a large
extent from pictures, which give us a way to hold on to the past –
escape death. Paradoxically, in being outside time, photographs have
a death-like aura. Awareness of death is insinuated in memory and
implicated in film.
In my films, memory as presence, presently felt, works through
repetition, through layers of superimposed images, through text and
images taken from history, through still photos as they are held within
and contrast with the film’s moving images – and memory arises in a
questioning of identity.
Memories, imaginings, dreams, anticipation – in the mind, as in film –
coexist, mingle, exert force.























Ideas and motifs recur in different ways in different films: the
elements earth, fire, water, sky and the cycle of seasons; the mystery
of everyday life caught out of the corner of one’s eye, a glimpse, a
surprise; the temporality of life and of film; and the solitary and heroic
status of the individual confronting life, living with the knowledge of
death.

A fellow filmmaker once remarked that, in my films, people are seen
alone – as opposed to many films about relationships. I am an existen-
tialist in that I think we come into and go out of this world alone, and
that, in fundamental ways, we cannot know each other. However,
I also think that we cannot fix the boundaries between ourselves and
the world – where do I end and You begin? We are part of an ocean
of energy – expansive, belonging. People are in my films, but are not
central. We are part of a bigger picture.

“… the precarious, wondrous, solitary, terrifying, utterly common
condition of human life.” “The Living” Annie Dillard

In depicting the contradictions and paradoxes of life, my films
say “and” rather than “or”: light and shadow, good and evil, love and
anger, life and death. I use many images and meaning, or a sense of
something, something of the complexity and fullness of the world,
accumulates over the duration of the film.

Light and shadow. The play between revealing and concealing – the
constant motion between.

Everything is there at every moment. We only catch a bit.

My process of making a film is one of collecting and shaping. With a
general idea in mind, things in the world jump out calling to be filmed,
certain sights attract me. Then selecting, which often involves re-filming
on the optical printer, and editing. Looking and more editing – my films
are made in the editing. Eventually the film is finished – though very
often it is not the one I set out to make!

“…there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between
the poles of disorder and order.” Walter Benjamin

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the
task of the artist now.” Samuel Beckett

When I started making films and realized the potential in
the medium once the constraints of narrative were removed, what
unlimited potential there was, I never looked back. I have been
exploring these possibilities ever since. I didn’t want film as a
recording/disseminating device for other art forms – the novel or
theatre. I tried to see if film could affect one directly as music does.
How can film retain ambiguity or create resonances in specific
representational images? How express filmicly a ‘sense’ of something?
The relation to image of sound, language, either as text or voiced, and
silence is in constant tension in a film. Changing the placement of
sound even slightly can alter the effect of a sequence creating accents,
causing an image to be noticed or to slide by barely seen. Music has
rhythmic and emotive power. Language has authority – we believe the
voice/over. In silence we are held by image.
The soundtrack can work in sympathy with the image track or act as
counterpoint, disruption. It is important to me to balance the impact
of language and sound so that, in a dialectic relationship with image,
they contribute to meaning but don’t determine it.

My films have tended towards the light – not without an
awareness of suffering – but with a sense of an on-goingness that
could be thought optimistic.
Sometimes, however, despair wins out… thought-less-ness …
In some works I’ve focused on the dark, what’s hidden in the
shadows; in others, darkness is indicative of fullness, a density
of life lived – layers of experience.

Time is vast, encompassing, unstoppable. It is finite,
measurable – and infinite.

Simultaneity of times co-exist in the mind and over space. It’s all
happening all the time.

A MEMORY: I was 11 or 12 and walking along a dirt path in
Temagami, Ontario. As I walked I passed a girl on my right on a
teeter-totter. I thought how she is experiencing this moment in her
body and I, at the same moment, in mine, with the same sounds in
the background and the same sun shining – but differently. And then
I had the thought that there is a girl somewhere in Africa experiencing
this very moment and that for her this is what life is. For me, this other
set of conditions and sensations, this other reality, is “life”.

I am lucky to have found film. Its properties intersect with
my interest in how we perceive time as it is passing – the rhythm of
life, how it presses on us – history, memory, anticipation; how we
experience realities – inner and outer worlds; how we relate to and
situate ourselves as humans in the world. 
My films are not totally structural or purely medium-based. I make
films from observing the world around me, from ideas developed
through a wide range of reading, and from working with the medium –
one film leads to another.
The structure of several of my films is circular, the ending reflecting
the beginning, but with a difference experienced in its duration. And
the endings reflect an honesty or fidelity to life – in life there aren’t
neat endings – it just continues on.
In the last few years (I measure things in years now – time goes by so
quickly) I’ve been reading and thinking about the term ‘late’ as applied
to Beethoven’s late works. Are the late works weaker, past prime, or do
the fractures and flaws indicate a willingness to take risks that might
very well only come late in life?





For me, film is analogous to life. We apprehend life and film
with our intellects and our bodies. Understanding accumulates over
time – and a lot we know cannot be said.

All art attempts to express the ineffable, that which cannot be expressed.

“The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little
daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
Virginia Woolf



Text and photographs:
Barbara Sternberg
www.barbarasternberg.com

Design:
Anne O’Callaghan

Production:
Shawn Samson

© Barbara Sternberg
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-9730708-3-5