AD HOC #80: SEEING, BASICALLY: NEW AND OLD FILMS BY BARBARA STERNBERG
With the Filmmaker, in person!
October 7, 2025, 7PM
Innis College, 2 Sussex Avenue, room 222

AD HOC presents two films by Barbara Sternberg.

Note: this is a free, unticketed event. Seating will be on a first-come first-served basis.

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.

Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists' film and video exhibition group. She wrote a handbook and conducted workshops on Media Literacy for high school teachers. She recently organized the "Association for Film Art" (AFFA) to actively support and promote awareness and appreciation of film art. While living in the Maritimes, Sternberg co-founded Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick.

Sternberg wrote a column, "On (experimental) Film" for several years for Cinema Canada, and has written essays on artists and on filmmakers. As well, she has written on the status of film art in galleries and museums—an issue on which she has conducted symposia and lobbied vigorously.

PROGRAMME:
Elemental Vision, or, a film for the rest of my life (2024, 30 minutes, 16mm) - “Elemental Vision or a film for the rest of my life" is 'about' light and time - moments captured in their passing, light events shot in various rhythmic patterns. It is about light and not particularly about the objects lit. The congruence of film's basic properties with how we experience reality (in time/motion, through light) has been a guiding factor in my approach to filmmaking. Of course, there are people and other natural subjects filmed - incorporated -coming into view - a surprise. Intertitles mark sections, create pauses and breaks. They come from various sources suggestive of film terminology and of different visions of being, many ways of knowing the world - scientific, poetic/spiritual, and everyday-ish."

Beating (1995, 64 minutes, 16mm) - "Beating" — 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 film brings together the individual personally lived and the communal, historic perspective; hatred and forgiveness; laughing and crying. Also brought in relation: the politics of gender and the holocaust; the Old World and North America. Passages of emotion - our lives as we experience them today - move through a terrain of memory and anlaysis.

Beating exists in the area of boundaries. I work with images as they can be registered between abstraction and representation, between blurred and defined, between the formless and the formed in-between, in motion. I try to render images suggestively, bodily and to use vocalizations and words for texture as well as information. "Water, like fire, is a dimension of the carnival insisting on the stateless and the flux... a world in which hierarchies were collapsing, boundaries dissolving... a state of becoming, not of being." (Robert Kroetsch) The film's surface, scratched and mottled, negative and positive, black & white and colour bears witness to storms of emotion. From section to section, repetitions occur, connections are made—reminiscences, equivalences between different images—to achieve the feeling or recognition that everything is related. It is all there all the time."

AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.

AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.
AD HOC would like to thank Alberto Zambenedetti, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, and the staff of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute.