Presented in association with The Lab
Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here

I use many different images and allow for their multiple reading. A sense of something, of the fullness, the complexity and relatedness of the world accumulates over the duration of the film. In depicting the contradictions and paradoxes of life, my films say “and” rather than “or”—light and shadow, good and evil, life and death. I work with images between abstraction and representation; between thinking and feeling. When images are emptied of meaning, they approach being. I think of film as analogous to life. The ephemerality of life is echoed in the temporal nature of film, the “stuff” of life in the emulsion, and the energy, life-force in the rhythmic light pulses. Light, Energy, Life.
— Barbara Sternberg

A central figure in Toronto film communities, Barbara Sternberg is known for a large body of 16mm films which explore film’s physicality, manifesting as ecstatically and sensually experiential, while also provoking overlapping and contradictory perceptual modes. From an expansive body of nearly forty films, this evening’s program presents two long-form works by Sternberg—Like a Dream that Vanishes (1999) and In the Nature of Things (2011)—two far-reaching and ambitious films which dive deep into realms of philosophical speculation, contemporary myth and miracle.

Barbara Sternberg is the co-editor of Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (2021). This publication will be available for perusal and purchase at the screening and can also be ordered here.

SCREENING:
Like a Dream that Vanishes (1999) by Barbara Sternberg; 16mm, color, sound, 39 minutes. Print from the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre
In the Nature of Things (2011) by Barbara Sternberg; 16mm, color, sound, 43 minutes. Print from the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre
TRT: 82 minutes

https://www.sfcinematheque.org/screening/your-life-is-like-a-candle-burn...