Amy Greenfield

This first feature by Amy Greenfield brings to the screen the story of the daughter of Oedipus in an emotionally relentless, visually stunning New Music Film Opera which challenges the conventions of narrative cinema to create a genre of its own. The 2500-year-old drama of the woman who defied the state to bury her brother is transformed through stark, ceaseless movement, haunting sounds and music (including themes from Glen Branca, David Van Tieghem, Elliot Sharp and Diamanda Galas) and words of outcry against our own world's injustice.

Like female artists in other forms - Carolee Schneeman, Versuchka, Charlotte Moorman- who covered their bodies with earth and paint and chocolate, Greenfield in Element reveals a femaleness both transgressive and erotic. She unites complex associations of death and birth in a visceral mud-caked performance.

Female dancers “clothed” in electronically generated flaming colors reincarnate Thomas Edison’s 1894 hand-tinted film “Annabelle Dances”.

My wedding gift to Robert Haller and Amy Greenfield. The publishers of the Anthology Film Archives are very happy with the making this farce.

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A film by Amy Greenfield.

Directed by Amy Greenfield.

Directed by Amy Greenfield.

The classical nude as video in four male/female duets

Directed by Amy Greenfield.

A nude woman whirled continuously till exhausted. The only sounds were the motion of her feet, the rustle and flap of drapery, and the increasingly labored rhythm of her breathing. Images were superimposed and dramatic patterns of light and form appeared with repeated close-ups of her body.

Video by Amy Greenfield

A visual poem in which a young man and woman move from dead weight (death) to transcendent flight (rebirth) distilling the extremes of the early 1970s, from the Vietnam war to space exploration.

Five basic elements: l) a dancer, Francine Breen; 2) a pair of internally illuminated fiber optic lights she holds in her hands; 3) a background screen (physical) and a foreground screen (electronic, constructed in the video editing process); 4) external illumination that pulses and flickers at a rhythmic but changing rate; and 5) a music score by Marilys Ernst.

... has been used in women's studies classes on rape. Its energy is the energy of protest and of rock music. A woman is dragged and dragged through dirt with increasing violence. As the violence increases, so does the beat and intensity of the harsh, eletronic sound. The audience can identify deeply with the woman's movements and so experience the depth of this violence.–A. G. "She abandons her body entirely."–Boston Sunday Herald.

Greenfield's subjective camera zooms in and out at a dizzying pace on performer Suzanne Gregoire, who is completely nude in a pair of stilettos and a long string of extra large pearls. She is bound and tangled in the expansive string of pearls while she plays Nam June Paik's interactive piano/video installation Pyramid- Interactive with her convoluted body. She pounds the piano in a desperate physical wail. The audience is given the ultimate impression of internal calamity pulled in a cerebral storm of transgressing emotions. Her image fills the mountain of screens, she hammers and tears at her pearls, her eyes make contact with the audience, her body shakes and quivers. The accompanying soundtrack facilitates and promotes this increasing transgression by mixing the rogue piano notes with the classic sounds of Beethoven's piano sonata. Her head reaches back, the pearls tighten, she exhales, the piano fades, it is understood this dance continues on in an ethereal sphere now.

Directed by Amy Greenfield.

Choreographer Amy Greenfield shifted her focus from live dance to film and saw the shift as a way to reveal the dancer's inner self rather than the external appearance stressed by dance training.

Shot from between 48 and 250 fps, Tides reverses Maya Deren's At Land, with the first shot instead of spewing Deren up onto the beach, instead sweeps Greenfield into the sea to turn words of Neitchze into a cinematic experience of "Far out glitter space and time . . . joy, deeper than heart's agony. . . for all life wants eternity, wants deep eternity."

Film by Amy Greenfield