Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Ontario Cinematheque, Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries including the University of Guelph, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Dunlop Art Gallery, as well as the Universite d'Avignon, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life- questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video.
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 in thr ...
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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 space ne ...
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The day as it went along – feeling the light of the present…what else is there? ...
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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. Porou ...
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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 film and ...
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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, races, and ...
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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. ...
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The central image of in the nature of things is the Forest- sometimes fearful, sometimes a refuge, always mysterious, and the multiple associations and myths embedded in it- myths within which we live and which live within us- our collective history. But, ...
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A short video documentary by Barbara Sternberg, approximating the dual-screen approach of the titular filmmaker. Brown speaks candidly, is shown in a studio; An excerpt from his film Memory Fade (2009) follows the footage. One of many of Sternberg's interv ...
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vers(ing) opens in a coffee shop. People, sit, enter and exit. A conversation is heard. The video continues, traveling through the streets of a city, to a park, to other coffee shops, other places. No particular destination is reached, but as we travel, fr ...
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After Nature, after the Fall, after all - where do we go from here? Digital imagery and optically printed superimpositions combine in a cascading plunge to no(w)here – new beginnings or more of the same? ...
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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. ...
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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. ...
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Our busy comings and goings, on the move, working at life are pictured, but layers of images and scratched emulsion make viewing through the depths an effort. If we scratch the surface, however... Glimpses of other states suggest we can surface. ...
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Emotions come & go; so do people. The world is an awful & awesome place; so is the mind. We hear dark inner thoughts of a person & see people taking in the first spring sun in a public park in Toronto. As the World Churns... ...
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Where does 'I' leave off and the 'world' begin; when does 'past' end and 'present' begin? Images blurring boundaries suggest the relatedness of being. A few moments in an English garden thinking of Virginia Woolf. ...
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"Your life is like a candle burning. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning. ...
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"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 is lik ...
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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 seen is l ...
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In midst, Barbara Sternberg has made a lyrical film about attachment, integration, belonging. Many of the familiar elements of Sternberg's work are here: speed, pulsing rhythms, explosions of colour, light and shape, images of nature and the built environm ...
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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. ...
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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 implications, the ...
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The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger; and the pressure of history on one's identity-how do I identify myself as "I", how as part of a "we"? The film ...
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This film is about love - relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is personal, though anonymous, or singular. Another voice-over reads parables, which present a context for the possi ...
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The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a libr ...
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Transitions is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being in-between-between falling asleep and being awake, between here and there, between being and non-being. These metaphysical themes are evo ...
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Opus 40" is about repetition: repetition in working and living, repetition through multiplicity and series, repetition to form pattern and rhythm, repetition in order and in revealing. ...
Watch Now"Your life is like a candle burning. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning. ...
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"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 the fai ...
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