Stephanie Barber

Yon and Payola find themselves in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their considerable tome on the age of enlightenment to Yon. Payola's research, and presentation of this research, is a purposeful affront to empirical data, the scientific method and other enlightenment ideals, while reveling in the desire for the revolution and intellectual expansion those thinkers championed. The concepts are undermined by the form and register of their delivery OR the concepts are strengthened by the poetry through which they are presented.

A film by Stephanie Barber.

Depicts the daily life of "Layton House," a fictional therapeutic community, where doctors live with their schizophrenic patients. The characters and events of Layton House were drawn from writings of the anti-psychiatry movement , whose most famous proponent was R.D. Laing. In this film we see experimental therapies, power struggles, and the individual arcs of mental illness converge, as a community struggles to understand itself and determine its destiny.

A brief, poetic 16mm film on a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. What begins as a reverence for natural beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field work of high modernism which, in many cases eschewed the banality of such 'natural' beauty. The collaged soundtrack suggests weightier concerns, gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape.

A little kitten is pet by a feather.

A mini-revolution. Wrong choices. The divorce of ethereal beauty and mystery so common in experimental films. In Stephanie Barber's films. What begins as devastatingly awkward or "tender" unfolds itself to show a deceptive, strangely rigid literary formalism commented upon by the content. The two (form and content) dance around, moving towards and away from each other in the tricky, clear dialogue. Hyper-reflexivity, art and love (and the role faith plays in each of these). The filmmaker writes, "I, myself, feel safest around purposefulness, can read more clearly an artist's work when I trust that choices have been weighed, bear meaning. This film requires a great deal of faith because it is strange and labile. Its device-ness is so apparent as to have left it naked. And then so naked as to be, perhaps, closed again."

Yon and Payola find themselves in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their considerable tome on the age of enlightenment to Yon. Payola's research, and presentation of this research, is a purposeful affront to empirical data, the scientific method and other enlightenment ideals, while reveling in the desire for the revolution and intellectual expansion those thinkers championed. The concepts are undermined by the form and register of their delivery OR the concepts are strengthened by the poetry through which they are presented.

A film by Stephanie Barber.

A brief, poetic 16mm film on a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. What begins as a reverence for natural beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field work of high modernism which, in many cases eschewed the banality of such 'natural' beauty. The collaged soundtrack suggests weightier concerns, gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape.

A little kitten is pet by a feather.

A mini-revolution. Wrong choices. The divorce of ethereal beauty and mystery so common in experimental films. In Stephanie Barber's films. What begins as devastatingly awkward or "tender" unfolds itself to show a deceptive, strangely rigid literary formalism commented upon by the content. The two (form and content) dance around, moving towards and away from each other in the tricky, clear dialogue. Hyper-reflexivity, art and love (and the role faith plays in each of these). The filmmaker writes, "I, myself, feel safest around purposefulness, can read more clearly an artist's work when I trust that choices have been weighed, bear meaning. This film requires a great deal of faith because it is strange and labile. Its device-ness is so apparent as to have left it naked. And then so naked as to be, perhaps, closed again."

According to filmmaker Stephanie Barber, "This is probably the most heartbreaking film I have made." The pacing is romantic and simple, haiku-esque pauses and inclusions, with the words contrasting this poetry with their factual, disinterested narration. And that narration is a simple statement of failure; one which lies not in any action but in the pre-thought to that action, the hope or faith one holds in oneself, one's knowledge or abilities.

In The Jungle, playfully and sorrowfully tells the tale of an unreliable narrator in a self imposed exile. Given a grant to study the equivalent of animal cries and whines in jungle flora our heroine has lived for 1, 612 days deep in an unnamed jungle. This jungle serves as an extended metaphor for excessive and continual growth and death and fear and sustenance; a metaphorical space of chaos in which the scientist finds solace and which stands in contrast to the human jungle of 'civilization'.

In The Jungle, playfully and sorrowfully tells the tale of an unreliable narrator in a self imposed exile. Given a grant to study the equivalent of animal cries and whines in jungle flora our heroine has lived for 1, 612 days deep in an unnamed jungle. This jungle serves as an extended metaphor for excessive and continual growth and death and fear and sustenance; a metaphorical space of chaos in which the scientist finds solace and which stands in contrast to the human jungle of 'civilization'.

Found footage film with a Chinese circus. The audience embraces the spectacular, theatrical elements. The appreciation is clearly mutual. Suggestive editing, inspired by avant-garde master Bruce Conner, makes the spectacle even more focused.

CATALOG is a composition of stillness. An inversion of the spectacle. Actors are posed, recreating various photographs in surroundings unfrozen. The soundtrack is a dense tale of spaces. A photograph more mutable than an image should be.

Conceptually, Stephanie Barber's short film LETTERS, NOTES is simplicity itself: found photographs hold the screen as animated texts transcribe brief notes and letters unmoored from context. And yet the elusive poignancy that emerges of this exquisite corpse structure is richly suggestive of the roots of narrative. If a code is a "reduced version of lang." (as one of the more enigmatic notes reads) then Barber’s film might be said to explore the possibilities of decoding: specifically, how cinema makes it possible to rewrite sounds and images as emotions. LETTERS, NOTES is another remarkable selection from the Cinemad Almanac.

A sonnet, the fifties family travel, through, say america, or time, a fascination with the exciting future, the image is purposefully jerky and toy-like with the casio keyboard beats a (faux, dated) take on the serial pieces to come later. The entirely is falling apart, or so close to falling, toy machines. There's not so much really put down, but a lot of pointing and elbowing.

“Why is she talking like that?” A child is not Lost Horizon’s most appreciative viewer.

A short trip around, like a poem or a nostalgia for what you never had or knew anything about. We pick up speed around the equator. ANGUS MUSTANG is paralleling different travels, the physicality of travel pointed to, most clearly in the soundtrack and the pacing of the film, with the referees of travel's many orphans springing through the implied history.

METRONOME is both the most straightforward (as well as the most difficult) of Stephanie Barber's films. It is very dear to the filmmaker's heart. The soundtrack of a radio play is off-set by the intractable images of "spaces." The former seems to balance precariously between kitsch and true heart-rending emotion and the latter references the asceticism of seventies minimalism (in experimental film) with the impenetrable intellectualism becoming increasingly moving as the film progresses. The marriage of these two elements is an odd tension: the tale of the play, the threat of limb extraction, asks the necessity of "whole and what the elements are which compose complete."

The video hovers tentatively between therapy, documentary, poetics and mystic traipsery and ends, like all good things, in surrender to song. There is a challenge presented (the challenge to engage earnestly with the piece as it requests) to fall into the breathing and pacing presented, and the challenge to view the video as a discrete piece of art at the same time. The piece relies heavily on the text, the disembodied Virgil through which the words become musical, instructive and (due to the absence of image) visual.

An expanded text piece which considers human’s press against (alienation from?) the natural world. An installation utilizing words as sculptural elements to contemplate the morphological state of language and nature. the way each need endlessly change and evolve. The way we use each. discard and re-invent each. A philosophical treatise which tries to understand the word nature.

The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart. Also, here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is scratched between two voices. Jayne love reads a text i wrote for her, short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of Richard (Oswan) Williams' beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me.

The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart. Also, here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is scratched between two voices. Jayne love reads a text i wrote for her, short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of Richard (Oswan) Williams' beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me.

The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart. Also, here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is scratched between two voices. Jayne love reads a text i wrote for her, short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of Richard (Oswan) Williams' beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me.

For those who find listing and repetition romantic. A near perfect structure. Three acts, an auditory red herring and classic love story.

Small biographies and musing generalizations--men’s relations to each other and their lives. There is hope and loneliness, companionship and isolation and the simplest of filmic elements to contrast the complexity of human emotions. The delicacy of the formalist writing moves the listener from intimacy to universalism and back again, swaying gently to and fro like the rocking of a ship. The minimalism of the photographic presentation allows the viewer to recognize the humanity in each individual document of a body.

Stephanie Barber's moving reflection on movie theaters and Anthology Film Archives.

A film poem thinking about the physics of sound, the need sound has to vibrate and bounce off a molecule or atom to return to our ears; thinking about this physical property as a metaphor for spirituality or love.

A film by Stephanie Barber.

A portrait of risk and language, the experimental narrative Daredevils, presents a writer as she interviews a well-known artist and feels the reverberations of their discussion throughout her day. Visually spare, still and verbose the video constructs a metaphor of an artist’s life and work as daredevilry. –S.B.

A film by Stephanie Barber.

Stephanie Barber 2008 | 00:13:21 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 "how looking at what has become the skeletons of photographs is a visual lecture on aesthetic pleasure or emotion. and how being, almost entirely denied of this pleasure, or having the pleasure merely suggested induces a viewer to ruminate on the act of viewing and that of wanting to view. and maybe it is evolution which causes this anxiety and art form." A series of collages recreating the photographs of well known artists (Uta Barth, Kohei Yoshiyuki, Candida Hofer, Deborah Willis) and a very slight suggestion of the actual photographs. The soundtrack is composed of approximately 25 statements on photography. -- Stephanie Barber

Originally created for Milwaukee International with The Suburban's exquisite corpse video for the "No Soul For Sale" show at the Tate Modern. "The interior was delusional like any visual psyche. These interiors [...] are collaged from photos of various domestic items from Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian homes brought together to suggest one continuous home. I'm interested in the tension between the visible and the invisible cultural markers represented here" -Stephanie Barber.

While referencing the explorer Christopher Columbus, the film is actually a gift for filmmaker Stephanie Barber's friend, the performance artist Theresa Columbus. The short imagistic film is suggesting (or questioning) ever so gently the effects (both positive and negative) that exploring has on that which is being explored. Our most well known Columbus, now so often vilified, here stands in for a more psychological and artistic exploration and the fall out that can occur from that sort of expansionism as well. Like many of Barber's films, the piece itself works almost separately from the implications and sidelong glances of the title and the way it interacts with the (almost passive) images and (often quite dominant) soundtrack.

A haiku or love letter to the charm of two-dimensional images. The spectacle awaits our adoration, gives a tender intimation of collusion. (Stephanie Barber)

An experimental video composed of found photographs, original text and sound art, balancing between an essay film and poem.

WOMAN STABBED TO DEATH is a short film concerned with both the apathy of human receptivity and the perverse nature of free floating paranoia so artfully ingrained in women. it is a tiny horror film, with the soundtrack skipping blithely over the literal graves of millions and the metaphorical grave of one's feelings of safety.

made for an exhibition at the Inova gallery in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 2001.

of The One Minutes Series Healing Tool curated by Shana Moulton in 2015.⁠ ⁠⠀ "Take some video and sound. And make a healing tool out of it!"

Between June 25 and August 7 2011 Stephanie Barber moved her studio into the Baltimore Museum of Art where she created a new video each day in a central gallery open to museum visitors. The goal of this project was to create a series of short, poetic videos in the playful and serious footprints of Oulipo games and daily meditations. 30,000 days, at the baths, at the shore, the badger and the hare, billy and the magician, bruce nauman, dear randolph, delaney soyinka, the eclipse, edgar degas, for wg sebald, have you seen diane, i love you, invisible, july 1st, level of zero buoyancy, little kitten, miniatures, my regrets, the phone call, puppet television, romance novels, the shama bird in 1889, some animals, the survey, tatum's ghost, tears or rain or something that falls, time is running out, to be old, the tree shadow, what is a party

A playful and dark conversational study—wrapping prose poetry into the recognizable conversational form and allowing both connections and missed meanings. First the ladies visit, the image—a roving camera lovingly viewing a still image—calls up both the progress and stagnancy of their talk, then they go to watch a play—on a television, in a snow garden. In many ways the play references the cadence of the ladies' conversation—the tedious animosity and lack of attentive or appropriate response. I am thinking about the art of conversation, the various directions this art takes and the ways one's receptivity to dialog changes when the subjects creating this dialog are taken out of the equation, or suggested scantily.

A film by Stephanie Barber.

“All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space center, a frantic machine lost in the silence...” – JG Ballard

Stephanie Barber plays with old found footage of a boy on a street.