Marjorie Keller

DEPARTURE is a film that was shot in 1976-77 during a year when I lost my job due to both cutbacks at the campus at which I taught and my involvement in the movement against them. I collected footage and imagined I would edit the film together the night I left. I was unable to do this and it took several years to finish it.

Super 8mm transfer to digital, color, sound, 5:07 minutes. Still images of things passing; a diary between city and country. Marjorie Keller and Coleen Fitzgibbon drive to Carolee Schneemann’s to feed Kitsch.

A portrait of a mother with her arms full in the backyard bathing her twin babies as the early spring light sings and dances. Later the father cooks a fish. Marjorie Keller is the mother.

Georgic I: The annual produce first seen in spring. The furrowed earth ready for planting. The distribution, support and protection of young plants. The implements of the garden. Georgic II: The life of Virgil is recapitulated in summer, with a digression on the sacred. The sheep of Arcadia. The handling of bees. The pagan Lion of Kea. Georgic III: The skill and industry of the old man in autumn. Ancient custom and modern method. The use of implements of the garden. Georgic IV: The compost is prepared at season's end. The filmmaker completes THE ANSWERING FURROW with the inclusion of her own image. Note on the music: The music works with the image to parallel the trace of history. Charles Ives recalls Protestant hymns, which recall the origin of the hymn in 12th century Milanese music, which allows for that music closest to the hum of bees and of amplifiers, the Orthodox Greek chant.

This film was shot the same weekend as Z (Zee Not Zed), when Stan Brakhage was visiting University of Rhode Island, where Marjorie Keller was teaching at the time. They get some coffee, then go for a walk on a beach in an old whaling harbor.

“This film began as a view out six windows in a crescendo of evocation. Each window is a layer in a different style of representation. Each view reminds me of my past… Really, it’s a self-portrait.” –Marjorie Keller

Begun as a document for insurance purposes, OBJECTION catalogues the contents of a house with ever-increasing horror. The soundtrack carries the voices and sounds of the family unseen.

HEREIN charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman's autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side in New York, street prostitution and drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space and history.

"The film opens and there is a disfunction of the camera that gives two images at once. The tension between the first and the second, the wrestle to see which becomes dominant is like the tension between an observed couple. This couple is two singulars, one singular, one double, two doubles, and one triad. Sometimes they are separate, sometimes coupled, and sometimes collasped upon each other and the world. My intrusion is the film."-M.K

In THE WEB I delved for the first and only time into film as mischief-making; wicked, like a child.

MISCONCEPTION is composed of six parts that together chronicle the experience of one woman and her husband during the course of her natural childbirth. The film communicates the precision and care with which it has been assembled. [The] structure lends the film a pacing rhythm that has less to do with traditional cinema-verité documentary or film journalism than with the pacing and rhythm of poetry.

A young dancer re-choreographed through film editing. This film was originally made in standard 8mm from a home movie.

A life-light guilt trip, tragicomic psychodrama in the film time. Made in the darkness of my year in a women's dormitory. 1969, Tufts University, Medford, Mass. –M. K.

Three songs between heaven and earth. With Carmen, Susan, Joseph and Marcus Vigil.

Working in the diaristic mode of lyrical cinema, Marjorie Keller arranges fleeting impressions of a summer vacation as pearls on a string. Her deliberate rhyming of color and light contrasts wondrously with the incidental nature of the scenes depicted. Rockets are fired off in the backyard, mussels collected on a rocky shore and plates passed down a long picnic table. Keller’s montage grazes the sublime mystery of feeling at home.

A portrait: of Saul Levine, filmmaker and one-time Italian Ice Vendor./of the film surface & depth/so by the choice of image./ of the inside & outside light in the summer and the shower. –M. K.

A portrait: of Saul Levine, filmmaker and one-time Italian Ice Vendor./of the film surface & depth/so by the choice of image./ of the inside & outside light in the summer and the shower. –M. K.

The film deals simultaneously with girls becoming women, woman looking back on her childhood. It is pervaded with voluptuousness, with longing: the woman, disappointed in love, looking for lost innocence, the girl yearning for the power of her sex.

A study of the patterns and gesture of family when ceremony no longer counts. Made to remember the occasion and place myself as a part of it.

"A journal of change in pattern of living and seeing as determined by an often misfunctioning but faithful camera."-M.K

"A journal of change in pattern of living and seeing as determined by an often misfunctioning but faithful camera."-M.K

An elegy for a Newfoundland dog named Melville and a portrait of his owner.

The first two in a series of in-camera edited films by Marjorie Keller. ANCIENT PARTS portrays the symbolic differentiation and mock conquest of a boy and his mother. FOREIGN PARTS portrays the poetics of family life in an unfamiliar context. Two joined together as one.

Georgic I: The annual produce first seen in spring. The furrowed earth ready for planting. The distribution, support and protection of young plants. The implements of the garden. Georgic II: The life of Virgil is recapitulated in summer, with a digression on the sacred. The sheep of Arcadia. The handling of bees. The pagan Lion of Kea. Georgic III: The skill and industry of the old man in autumn. Ancient custom and modern method. The use of implements of the garden. Georgic IV: The compost is prepared at season's end. The filmmaker completes THE ANSWERING FURROW with the inclusion of her own image. Note on the music: The music works with the image to parallel the trace of history. Charles Ives recalls Protestant hymns, which recall the origin of the hymn in 12th century Milanese music, which allows for that music closest to the hum of bees and of amplifiers, the Orthodox Greek chant.

“This film doesn’t get anywhere…just like adolescence. The hair comes off, the hair goes on, the hairdresser moves this way and that, the music comes on again and again, Kathy and Steve do and don’t break up, it’s all true, it’s all a lie. I want people to be as free as possible when they watch it…” –Marjorie Keller

A film made by Marjorie Keller that document a successful struggle against welfare cuts by welfare clients, workers, and their allies.

Fleeting 8mm views of the Rhode Island coast reach beyond the home movie towards deeper mysteries of light and presence. With window-framed shots, intimate shadows and a few sly self-portraits, Marjorie Keller gestures towards a subjectivity of the light touch.

Directed by Marjorie Keller.

The We Demand march of 1971 was the first recorded political action taken by queer activists in Canada. The date of this march, August 28, 1971, coincided with the second anniversary of the passing of Bill C-150 which decriminalized gay sex in Canada. Although this reform of the 1969 Criminal Code led to the decriminalization of certain homosexual acts, it did not have much of a tangible impact on the policing and surveillance of queers. In fact, the policing of sex between men actually increased following Bill C-150.