This month, Early Monthly Segments is very pleased to host a screening of 16mm films by US-based filmmaker Mary Helena Clark. Clark is in Toronto to work on a new film based on Franco Moretti’s book Signs Taken for Wonders, the title of which could be an apt description of much of Clark’s filmography. Clark’s films place emphasis on fragments and momentary discoveries, whether the physical imprints of rotting textbooks found in a deserted school, as in After Writing, the very material detritus on a well-worn film print of Jean Cocteu’s Orphée, highlighted in Orpheus (outtakes), or the way traveling through an iconic city like San Francisco, featured in The Dragon is the Frame, can capture references to moments gone-by—both universal and personal.

The child: a subject like any other, in life as in film. But when the child appears on the screen, the adult viewer sees what he has been and will never be: a being in his early life.

This terrible and banal observation of the passage of time is accompanied by a working memory: the projected image is superimposed on that of his own childhood. And for each, according to his/her own history, memories emerge full of tender nostalgia and memories of specific painful moments.

From the newborn (Le corps humain, Alexandre Larose) to adolescence (Dressage, Julika Rudelius), these portraits of children will complement the extensive gallery that was formed from the origins of cinema.

Barbara Hammer will show six of her films related to the works on paper currently exhibited at KOW, and she will give insight in her artistic methodologies as a feminist filmmaker. 

A pioneer of queer experimental and documentary filmmaking, Barbara Hammer has helped write the history of feminist cinema. In more than eighty works, she increased the visibility of lesbian love and sexuality and encouraged lesbian women to choose self-determined lives. Born in Hollywood in 1939, the feminist activist picked up the camera in 1968 to propose alternative visions that sharply contrasted with the prevailing filmic languages, in which a male and heterosexual gaze predominated. She often broke new ground both with her themes and narrative forms and in her aesthetic experiments. Over almost five decades, her art has continually surprised fans and—no doubt deliberately—defied social clichés and conventions.