"Barbara Hammer paints a colorful portrait of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, from her childhood to her death in 1979. Bishop described herself as “timorously kicking around the coastlines of the world,” and the film is loosely organized around her stays in Nova Scotia, Key West, Brazil, and Cambridge—the homes she made for herself and the lovers she took. Never “out” as a lesbian—the concept would have been foreign to the writer who graduated from Vassar in the thirties—Bishop nonetheless actively pursued women, from her first summer-camp crush to her last affair. Hammer examines Bishop from all angles, interviewing everyone from literary luminaries like Marie-Claire Blais and Edmund White to Lota’s aged former maid. Hammer pulls the viewer into Bishop’s world, blending present day footage of each location with archival photos, and recreating moments in the writer’s life." Adapted from text by Monica Nolan (Frameline)

December 11, 2015 – January 10, 2016
With Lary 7, Bradley Eros, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Rose Kallal, Andrew Lampert, Bruce McClure, Joel Schlemowitz

Microscope is extremely pleased to present “Never Twice”, an exhibition of live moving image performance in the context of what is usually referred to as expanded cinema: works free from the constraints or presenting alternatives to the traditional theatrical screening setting – single projection on a screen before an audience. The title of the exhibit, a reference to the quote from Heraclitus “one cannot step into the same river twice”, emphasizes the ephemeral character of this art form, one always intrinsically connected to a “here” and “now”, a multi-sensorial experience that although it may be performed again, it cannot ever be replicated.

With her latest work, Barbara Hammer, who is known for films about lesbian life, history, and sexuality that draw upon avant-garde tradition, examines the little-known aspects of the life of the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979). Hammer’s film, shown here in its New York premiere, explores Bishop’s inner life through some of the homes in which she lived and wrote—from childhood to her final days—and through the more private and sensorial poems that were published after her death. Featuring music composed and performed by the experimental singer and musician Joan La Barbara; Bishop’s intimate poems read by Kathleen Chalfant; three actors representing Bishop’s physical presence at different stages of her life; and interviews by historians, poets, and students, Welcome to This House sensitively portrays a complex, private, and challenging writer whose poetry continues to inspire.

B3 is presenting an exhibition about yann beauvais's 40 years of activist, within experimental cinema and video art, since 1974. The show is curated by Jean-Michel Bouhours (Curator from Modern Art National Museum Historical Dept- Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and will be on display for 3 months from November 22nd 2104 to February 22nd 2015. For yann beauvais: Making experimental cinema is taking into account both an undervalued story, but also examine how non-narrative, are breaking with historical patterns of narration from a linear support: the movie.