Betzy Bromberg

This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split decision is a boxing term used when the judges divide their votes in finding a winner. In this case the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a pick-up, and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation and modes of radical representation - between conventional continuity editing, and abstraction created through computer generated grids. The film features an appearance by Carolee Schneemann and digital imaging from before the era of personal computers.

“Although the title refers to a condition of acute malnutrition in which a child is unable to assimilate food, the film is a robust and sumptuous offering. This is no rough-edged, craft-resistant effort. Rather it is infused with a seductive glamour.” –Janis Crystal Lipzin, ARTWEEK

“A subjective assault, a kind of found cinema, in which the pieces of existence, the pablum pop of Top 40 radio, mix effortlessly with thermonuclear techno-jargon, and stoned-out kids camping around in the buff co-exist in a restless uneasy mix with Times Square strip shows, neon effluvia, lugubrious country-western ballads and Bromberg’s own visceral polemics.” –Brian Lambert, TWIN CITIES READER

“I am interested in making films that explore intimate places of the interior. For me, the combination of visual and aural abstraction is sublime, a means of forging pathways without a path, journeys devoid of compass bearings, invoking mysterious and unearthly transports. I am interested in making work that has no points of reference, where scale replaces structure and time is experienced rather than counted. Glide of Transparency is a film in three movements, an exploration of color and light. Ultimately, it is a film about love and transcendence.” (bb)

"Petit Mal is a kind of double-portrait: both Bromberg and her subject insisting on moving freely, to open up space in an environment that would prefer to constrain and define”. – Vera Brunner-Sung, Millennium Film Journal Vol. No. 67 “Petit Mal is a raw, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink movie: choppy street scenes, a girl clowning, subway sequences enlivened by artless overexposures and split screens. What holds it together is the strong and unobtrusive audio track, a mélange of confessional rapping, nondescript mood music and slyly gratuitous sound effects.” – J. Hoberman, Art Forum

“The body, culture and nature are also at stake in Body Politic, a film that goes to a hospital operating room, research laboratories and a family picnic to outline the issues raised by genetic experimentation. With her typical serious humor, Bromberg explores both the claims of science (we can improve human life) and the claims of religion (God made perfect beings) and implicitly asks the question, “How do we know when we’ve gone too far?’…There’s no voice-over and the argument is made by an athletic juxtaposition of imagery and testimony.” – Helen Knode, L.A. Weekly

"DIVINITY GRATIS explores time and space, starting at the beginning of the world, with molten rock and water in sequences that are exquisite in their sensuousness. Bromberg’s ability to meld ideas and images is perhaps best exemplified in this work, which is truly breathtaking in its conceptual sweep. One line seems to unify the film – a voice repeats on the soundtrack, ‘A girl, blind from birth, saw the flash.’ The flash references an atomic blast, and thus links the film’s beginning section, which is all about origins, and the film’s suggestion of apocalypse, death and the infinite sweep of time.” –Holly Willis, LA WEEKLY

"DIVINITY GRATIS explores time and space, starting at the beginning of the world, with molten rock and water in sequences that are exquisite in their sensuousness. Bromberg’s ability to meld ideas and images is perhaps best exemplified in this work, which is truly breathtaking in its conceptual sweep. One line seems to unify the film – a voice repeats on the soundtrack, ‘A girl, blind from birth, saw the flash.’ The flash references an atomic blast, and thus links the film’s beginning section, which is all about origins, and the film’s suggestion of apocalypse, death and the infinite sweep of time.” –Holly Willis, LA WEEKLY

“Betzy Bromberg’s Voluptuous Sleep is a mesmerizing two-part 16mm meditation on the nuances of light, sound and feeling as evoked through the poetic artifices of cinema. Bromberg’s close-up lens becomes a tool of infinite discovery that reveals as much about our bodily sensations as it does the natural world. Combined with intricate and perfectly matched soundtracks, Voluptuous Sleep is a rapturous, re-centring antidote to the fragmentation of modern life and offers a new experience of cinematic time and memory. It is also an emotional tour de force.” -Steve Anker, Redcat

Sensuously dark and foreboding, Az Iz rouses an ancient and atavistic trance. – Kathleen Brennan-Waits In Az Iz, Bromberg builds what might be considered a jazz opera – it's all saxophone riffs, repetition and fragments, but swells to epic proportions, essaying notions of origins and archetypes. The deepest blues highlight the sky behind three people in the mountains, and later, black-and-white images of twisted and torqued trees resonate with all the mystical glory of Being. Az Iz, with its sense of grandeur and beauty, is downright breathtaking, and the effect is sublime. – Holly Willis, IFilm

"A precursor to the style and energy of my early 16mm films, which I tend to think of as a trilogy: comprised of ‘Petit Mal’, ‘Ciao Bella or Fuck me Dead’ [1978] and ‘Soothing the Bruise’ [1980]" (B.B)

An animated super-8 horror film made up of still photographs. "My friend Reynolds – also the painter in ‘Petit Mal’ – purposely cut her leg and we poured her blood onto the celluloid surface of ‘Screaming Susan’ to authenticate its horror status. I imagine the film’s surface must be very sticky now. It might not even be projectable!" (B.B)

“A Darkness Swallowed opens on a pair of faded photographs showing an old dented car, one with a child standing beside it and the other without. Speaking in voice-over, Bromberg references a past event, one that will forever haunt her although it occurred before her birth. The film then sinks downward, dipping below the surface of the rational world to mine the seemingly infinite layers of the past stored within the fleshy entrails, chalky bones, sinewy spider webs and gnarled ligaments of both the body and the Earth. Noises – of clanging metal, bells, heartbeats and jazz music, to name only a few – combine to create a dense sound environment, a seemingly immense, three-dimensional space for contemplation." – Holly Willis, L.A . Weekly

“A Darkness Swallowed opens on a pair of faded photographs showing an old dented car, one with a child standing beside it and the other without. Speaking in voice-over, Bromberg references a past event, one that will forever haunt her although it occurred before her birth. The film then sinks downward, dipping below the surface of the rational world to mine the seemingly infinite layers of the past stored within the fleshy entrails, chalky bones, sinewy spider webs and gnarled ligaments of both the body and the Earth. Noises – of clanging metal, bells, heartbeats and jazz music, to name only a few – combine to create a dense sound environment, a seemingly immense, three-dimensional space for contemplation." – Holly Willis, L.A . Weekly

A summer-in-the-city travelogue that mixes verité of Lower East Side Bikers, Times Square topless dancers, and Coney Island crowds to achieve an atmosphere of manic exhibitionism and sexual raunch.

A feature-length Super-8 autobiographical Film by Betzy Bromberg. "It was personal in terms of the image and soundtrack but I edited it without ever looking at the images – a truly structural film approach and a less than successful experiment." (B.B)