Holly Fisher

An experimental film by Holly Fisher that examines women's political and historical roles.

Goldfish Variations, like its companion piece Thinktank, is made from one minute of footage filmed with an iPhone in a Chinese restaurant in Berlin, reworked with 18 layers of shifting video. Music is by avant-garde composer Lois V Vierk, whose work is influenced by Japanese Gagaku music; here are layered sounds from four instruments of a string quartet.

"Optical printing links East with West within a mosaic of looped, layered and shifting images filmed originally on Super 8 while on a (train/car/thumb) trip across Europe in 1978. Swinging cow udders, woman sweeping, farm woman walking, nuns chanting, Nude Descending, voices in a bread shop, Dachau and other artworks from Documenta 7, riding the escalator of the Centre Pompidou, etc. are layered in overlapping, shifting, and repetitive frame-clusters pulled from Super 8 footage filmed on a trip that began in Bucharest and ended in Paris. Disparate elements are combined and manipulated to construct a lyrical work about walking, history, and memory." - Holly Fisher

Subway is a subterranean passage that lies somewhere between fiction and diary, with literal and psychological overtones from the late ’60s. Framed within a ride on the Harvard/Ashmont Subway Line at rush hour–as the train fills and then empties, moving further from downtown Boston while I direct my 7-year-old nephew, Ben, to stand and look around, sit, get off, watch himself depart, get back on, and walk away–intercut with various scenes from my on-going (Bolex) film diary; seagulls circling, anti-war street demonstration past Playboy Club in downtown Boston, large dogs leaping into saltwater, crowd on escalator, Ben’s image in surveillance camera, twilight through half-built, backlit Coop City under construction…

Re-enactment of a mellow evening with friends, in which a static camera, synchronous sound, a shiny cook pot, and an old wood stove conspire in a game of hide-and-seek with the viewer involving film illusion and point-of-view. A single strand of 16mm and/or a watched pot.

A non-linear mix of poetry and politics -- is a living history of Burma in the guise of a travel diary, as a way to describe life in a place where every reality is off-limits to both tourist and filmmaker. 'A nation, a society, a people, dying a slow death. How do you get that on camera?' asks exile/protagonist Dr. Zarni early on. Documentary and experimental techniques combine in a hybrid collage as much about media as it is about human rights, gradually putting the viewer at the center of a slippery vortex which begs the question: is Burma a country or a metaphor?

An experimental film by Holly Fisher that examines women's political and historical roles.

Goldfish Variations, like its companion piece Thinktank, is made from one minute of footage filmed with an iPhone in a Chinese restaurant in Berlin, reworked with 18 layers of shifting video. Music is by avant-garde composer Lois V Vierk, whose work is influenced by Japanese Gagaku music; here are layered sounds from four instruments of a string quartet.

"Optical printing links East with West within a mosaic of looped, layered and shifting images filmed originally on Super 8 while on a (train/car/thumb) trip across Europe in 1978. Swinging cow udders, woman sweeping, farm woman walking, nuns chanting, Nude Descending, voices in a bread shop, Dachau and other artworks from Documenta 7, riding the escalator of the Centre Pompidou, etc. are layered in overlapping, shifting, and repetitive frame-clusters pulled from Super 8 footage filmed on a trip that began in Bucharest and ended in Paris. Disparate elements are combined and manipulated to construct a lyrical work about walking, history, and memory." - Holly Fisher

Subway is a subterranean passage that lies somewhere between fiction and diary, with literal and psychological overtones from the late ’60s. Framed within a ride on the Harvard/Ashmont Subway Line at rush hour–as the train fills and then empties, moving further from downtown Boston while I direct my 7-year-old nephew, Ben, to stand and look around, sit, get off, watch himself depart, get back on, and walk away–intercut with various scenes from my on-going (Bolex) film diary; seagulls circling, anti-war street demonstration past Playboy Club in downtown Boston, large dogs leaping into saltwater, crowd on escalator, Ben’s image in surveillance camera, twilight through half-built, backlit Coop City under construction…

Re-enactment of a mellow evening with friends, in which a static camera, synchronous sound, a shiny cook pot, and an old wood stove conspire in a game of hide-and-seek with the viewer involving film illusion and point-of-view. A single strand of 16mm and/or a watched pot.

A non-linear mix of poetry and politics -- is a living history of Burma in the guise of a travel diary, as a way to describe life in a place where every reality is off-limits to both tourist and filmmaker. 'A nation, a society, a people, dying a slow death. How do you get that on camera?' asks exile/protagonist Dr. Zarni early on. Documentary and experimental techniques combine in a hybrid collage as much about media as it is about human rights, gradually putting the viewer at the center of a slippery vortex which begs the question: is Burma a country or a metaphor?

"In which memory confronts transition: "Haystacks, beerbottles, farmers, soldiers, church yards, and other passages from/through a preserve of folk culture near the Russian border, are inter-woven, via optical printer. Filmed in Maramuresh, Romania. (or:)"... Here today, gone tomorrow." –Fritz Buehner

An assemblage of sequences of water buffalo and related imagery (palms, bamboos, archives) culled from my work on Burma–filmed between 1996 and 2003. I made this especially for my friend and advisor of many years, Lance Bird, who has a deep love and appreciation of animals, not least, the water buffalo.

Trio en Rose is a playful, intricate dance piece in which the dancers are seagulls, walking about on the pink granite rocks of Brittany. My focus is their skinny legs, knobby knees, and wide flat feet (plus their cheeky fearlessness). Music is by contemporary composer Lois V. Vierk, whose work is influenced by Japanese gagaku court music. Gulls, layered glissandi, and crosscut editing between multiple frames interplay in counterpoint, and with ironic, tongue-in-cheek, formality.

"Glass Shadows is a sensual formalistic diary, filmed in the early morning light of my studio. The primary images are of my Bolex-filming nude reflection set within window frames, a pane of glass, and light projected by the rising sun. The film moves forward via on-going exploration of reflected and overlapping images––sustained by light, color, and the rhythmic pulse of a leaky kitchen faucet. A fusion of form and subject is inevitable within a work that is the story of its making." - Holly Fisher

"Ghost Dance for a new Century is a re-imagining of my earlier double-projection silent 16mm project Ghost Dance (1980), reworked here into a single, multi-layered, evolving digital canvas, rich in desert colors with pale whites overlapping, and fragments of running shadow interlaced. This film is inspired by the Native American dance performed especially in the 1890s to encourage renewal and prosperity – or from another point of view, to drive out the white man and bring back the buffalo. This is a meditative landscape piece, set between a eulogy for an unspoken past and a plea for attention to an unmapped future … Music is an original work called LENS, written and performed by composer/ cellist Ha-Yang Kim." - Holly Fisher

"This film is an intimate case study of pork barrel politics, framed within the on-going controversy over construction of the Florida Cross State Barge Canal by the US Army Corps of Engineers–a civil works project originally cooked up by President Henry Jackson, picked up and dropped by President Kennedy, and periodically re-visited by local groups with assorted vested interests. The Barge Canal was designed to shorten the oil-shipping route from Texas to New Jersey by cutting across the top of Florida, linking the Atlantic with the Pacific. The Oklawaha River, one of Florida’s last remaining wild rivers, was slated as primary water feed-source for the Canal. As a cinema verité depiction of a grass roots attempt to save the river from destruction, Progress, Pork-Barrel, and Pheasant Feathers is a story of profit pitted against beauty, made several years before the word “environment” was even in the political activist lexicon." - Holly Fisher

In 1965, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, there was the last operating fleet of sailing work boats in the United States. Forty-odd "Skipjacks" were still used by Maryland watermen to dredge up oysters from the Bay. At that time, the fleet had survived because of a Maryland conservation law which prohibits the use of motor power for oyster dredging. The watermen traditionally marked the opening of each oystering season with a skipjack race which the Maryland State Tourist Board incorporated into its annual "Chesapeake Bay Appreciation Day."

Here Today Gone Tomorrow (aka Rushlight) was made from a single, three minute roll of Super 8 footage shot over one day of stop/start driving through the Maramures folk district of Romania. I reworked this footage via JK Optical Printer using a larger than normal film gate designed (by myself) to allow the re-filming and hence layering of frame clusters as well as single frames. This project explores an intersection between transition and memory (passing time, times past, arrested in time, what lies ahead) through looping, stretching, and layering of images filmed originally while driving through this unique preserve of Romanian culture. A silent, visual sketchbook of sorts, this work explores the repetitive, cyclical structuring of this Super 8 footage developed over several years of working with a JK Printer. The result is an open and meditative work around the subject of “passage.”

OUT OF THE BLUE is a typically thought-provoking and contemplative work constructed from seemingly disparate elements: imagery recorded from the window of a plane during her trans-Atlantic travels, diary-like footage, found imagery and sound, and onscreen texts. The result is a highly personal, open-ended meditation on the passage of time, historical trauma, and liminal physical and emotional spaces that embodies Fisher’s radically multilayered approach: she juxtaposes multiple layers of visual and aural materials not only to create a rich visual experience, but to bring into play a dizzying and cross-pollinating array of ideas. The soundtrack features composer Lois V Vierk’s long-form piece, “Words Fail Me,” a work inspired by Vierk’s experience as an eyewitness to the fall of the World Trade Center, twenty years ago.

Camping in Down East, Maine with artist friends evolved into a spurt-framed portrait of artist Donn Moulton. Footage of Moulton in Maine, his studio in Cambridge, and installation of his fiberglass apple paintings at Kornblee Gallery, NYC, is intercut with edited-in-camera expressionistic sequences from our camping trip.

Dragon bones and snakes embracing; skeletons in underwear, flying shoes and bug-eyed aliens are among the characters that comprise the annual NYC Halloween Parade — filmed and transformed into a subjective extra-terrestrial dreamscape. Fragmented, cyclic, and in continual flux, b e d e v i l e d is a collage in motion, grounded within a visible construct of open and ever-shifting frames. From early furtive sketches I’ve reworked my original Hi-8 video into a layered weave of images cut to phase between the imaginary and ‘reality’ — from Day of the Dead spectacle to clocks at play with light bulbs. The haunting music of avant-garde composer Lois V Vierk is performed by cellist Theodore Mook.

Filmed in the multiple-mirrored women's bathroom of the New York City Holiday Inn--in which the most visible object was myself looking at myself, looking at... In pursuit of contradictions.

"Ghost Dance (1980) takes the viewer on a spiraling descent into Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly, from the rim at the top to the Navajo ruins on the mud-caked canyon floor. A systemic looping technique via JK Optical Printer creates images that are stretched, recycled, and interwoven, altering one’s perceptions of time and space in relation to the immediate “present.”" - Holly Fisher

2 x 2 came about by chance when I arbitrarily cut together two of my recent short films, each made with different intent, and with music by two very different contemporary composers, Lois V Vierk and composer/cellist Ha-Yang Kim. Juxtaposing these two unlikely works would of course highlight differences within our sensibilities, but what was more compelling to me was to shed light on what we have in common. Each of us works within a layered, complex, and quite rigorous language of our own making; my guess is that the three of us hold a deep respect for the audience, and so seek ways within our unique media to create space, agency, and desire whereby each spectator may form her/his own meaning. But in no way did I anticipate the spark and mysterious deep resonance I experienced when I put these works together in a single piece. I’ve come to think of 2 x 2 as my “e-motion diptych” – and as a project that seems to transcend the unique sensibilities of each of us.

"Inspired by a passage from Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form, this film explores relationships between film and language while playfully challenging the Russian filmmaker’s theory of film montage … and thus lies between a wink and a nod to the master. Also a bit of tongue-in-cheek to myself as aspiring film studies student: had I been a good typist I very likely would never have become a filmmaker." - Holly Fisher

Made as a variation of TRIO EN ROSE (S8 video original material filmed with a consumer camera in Brittany, 2006), RUFFLED FEATHERS is a playful, intricate, and multi-layered dance piece — in which the dancers are seagulls, walking about on the pink granite rocks of the Côte d’Amour.

“softshoe for bartok is next in my on-going play/experimenting with film structure –– relative to memory, time, perception, and in this case, travel. This project is a film/video re-imaging of my 16mm film s o f t s h o e from 1987, made via optical printer from S8 film imagery shot ten years earlier on an east-west trip across Europe; using home-movies as the original source, this work is a cross/weave, or perhaps more a chance-encounter, with images from rural Romania, traces from the contemporary art exhibit documenta 6, Kassel, Germany, and a ride on the iconic escalator of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Three decades later and with the advent of multi-track video I revisited this film, using it now as template –– for the lush, layered, and intentionally subversive collage of still and motion that is softshoe for bartok.” –Holly Fisher

"Two films & two iPhone sketches, with 40 years between them. Includes formal studies in light & shadow, subjectivity & objectivity, film material and the creative process. Filmmaker’s self-portrait in time, and by chance." - Holly Fisher

Linking 9/11 with the Holocaust via “the telling of memories” by visual artist José Urbach, witness to both. José speaks almost magically, from childhood to the present, and anywhere in between. Recorded in the shadow of the World Trade Center towers only months after their collapse

“ ... photographer Peter Lindbergh and experimental filmmaker Holly Fisher collaborate to weave together a tapestry of images, incorporating Lindbergh’s still pictures with clips from the Tony Richardson film Mademoiselle (1966), starring Jeanne Moreau. The photographs are animated through a re-filming process to create a flow of moving images that are intercut with passages from the movie. Iconic actress Jeanne Moreau, using a text by American poet Kimiko Hahn, narrates the diary-like fragments of memories and recollections in the first person. The haunting music by Lois V Vierk accentuates the fleeting quality of these fragments of dreams and memories.” — Jon Gartenberg

Two sketches involving radical reworkings, via optical printing, of images gathered from the Texas border and from the fringes of a small Colorado rodeo. The ideas for GHOST DANCE came from here. –H. F.

"Thinktank is a tapestry in motion – in which 24 layers of iPhone video of swimming goldfish are laced with ambiguous floating text–transforming over time from a playful meditation on language into a haunting look into the ethos of the U.S. government surveillance dragnet. Music is by avant-garde composer Lois V Vierk." - Holly Fisher