Holly Fisher

This film recounts the murder of Vincent Chin, an automotive engineer mistaken as Japanese who was slain by an assembly line worker who blamed him for the competition by the Japanese auto makers that were threatening his job. It then recounts how that murderer escaped justice in the court system. Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, in association with the Museum of Chinese in America. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, with additional support provided by Todd Phillips.

A POET ON THE FRONTLINE will introduce audiences to the world of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the famous daredevil war correspondent and one of the world's most important contemporary literary figures. Known as "Indiana Jones with a notepad," Kapuscinski is a legend among his peers who has been looking for the truths of human experience in the most dangerous places. Filmmaker Gabrielle Pfeiffer traveled with Kapuscinski in four countries, capturing his true character, his passion, his humor and his demons. Her film interweaves Kapuscinski's childhood as a refugee in Poland during WWII, with his later experiences on the battlefields of the Third World, in a poetic reverie of the tragedy and the absurdity of war. It also looks at the lines between journalism and literature, and challenges of the writer in the face of censorship.—Gabrielle Pfeiffer

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.

The career of iconic and influential poet and writer Audre Lorde is seen up until death.

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."

“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

"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

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.

"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

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

Produced and directed by Samuel Hudson in 1970, this experimental documentary follows a young couple, Sue and Steve, as they prepare for their wedding ceremony. The film is sectioned into five chapters, each highlighting a different theme with abstract film techniques. Hudson utilizes pixilation, stop-motion, and animation along with wedding photographs and interviews.

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.

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 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.

"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

"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

"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

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…

A documentary about Lisa Hsia, a Chinese-American woman who was raised in Illinois and returns to China search of her identity and to discover her roots. A film full of humor that mixes animation, home movies and sequences shot in Chicago and in the People’s Republic of China, where the film-maker found some of her family.