Seething Under Snow: Film and Video Program

The Carolee Schneemann Foundation and EAI are pleased to offer three programs of film and video available for free screening online from December 15, 2023 to January 30, 2024.

Carolee Schneemann’s films—including Fuses (1964–67), Viet-Flakes (1965), Plumb Line (1971)—are heralded as classics of the postwar avant-garde film movement in their radical deconstruction of the role of the performer, their presentation of the female body, and their blurring of the distinctions between documentary and fiction. They subvert and transcend the tropes of conventional cinema and defy expectations of the avant-garde film through their presentation of the personal, the ecstatic, and pressing social issues. When she shifted from celluloid to video in the late 1970s, Schneemann continued to push against the expectations of the medium with single-channel video works and more elaborate video installations, from Up To and Including Her Limits (1973–76) to Devour (2003–04), that explore themes of gender and sexuality, identity and subjectivity, and war.

Here, CSF and EAI have invited the Estate of Ellen Cantor, Cheryl Donegan, the Estate of Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Joan Jonas, Andrew Lampert, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler, and the Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive to present work in dialogue with three strands of Schneemann’s moving-image work: antiwar films and videos, sex and images of the body, and winter celebrations. These strands overlap freely, as Kenneth White explores in his essay “Hello, Darkness,” also published on this website.

The presentation complements Schneemann’s exhibition Of Course You Can / Don’t You Dare at PPOW (392 Broadway) through January 20, 2024.