Anita Thacher
Directing
Biography
Anita Thacher was a New York-based artist known for her work in a variety of mediums–film, video, public art, multimedia, light, architectural and sculptural installation, as well as painting, photography and prints. Her art explores issues of perception both spatial and personal. Memory, childhood and domestic themes are fundamental elements in the work. She was the recipient of numerous grants and awards among them are The National Endowment for the Arts (four grants), The New York State Council on the Arts (five grants), The Ford Foundation, The American Film Institute, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The New York Women in Film and Television Preservation Fund. Public collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art, Arsenal, Internationales Forum des Jungen Films among others. Her films are distributed by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Arsenal, Berlin and Light Cone, Paris among others. Her prints are available through The Metropolitan Museum of Art store and VanDeb Editions. Anita Thacher is represented by Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, New York. National and international exhibitions include The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The New York Film Festival, P.S.1, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jeu de Paume, Paris and The Whitney Museum of American Art among others. Ms. Thacher was a MacDowell Colony Fellow, former member of its Board and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow.
Known For
A young man recalls his affair with a young French woman who traveled with him across the United States. They began to drift apart during the trip, and eventually each had affairs with other people before realizing that their relationship had run its course.
Crush Proof
Illustrates the writer's wandering spirit, from a childhood in Nova Scotia to travels in Brazil, and the central themes of her work: geography, landscape, and the quest for consciousness and identity through travel.
Elizabeth Bishop: One Art
CUT appropriates 6 classic black and white Hollywood film clips from the 30's and 40s. The images and the sound are reconfigured through graphic and sequential interventions. The disruptions refocus and enhance our attention to latent aspects of the films and compel us to watch with heightened awareness and new appreciation.
Cut
An attorney, disenchanted with his bland dystopic existence, takes a walk on "the wild side".
Prism
Mysterious cinematographic events unfold in a very neat little space, like a theatre. A ball gets bigger and bigger and then suddenly disappears: there’s a dog a good head or two taller than a child; a young woman miniscule one second is huge the next… We don’t get it, but just enjoy taking part in a phantasmagorical experience like an audience in the early days of cinema, with filmmakers that have made an illusion out of this art.
Loose Corner
No description available.
To the Top
Chase has appropriated the masterful car chase scene from Bullitt . The manipulation of the scene’s images and sounds allows the viewer to discover the classic film scene anew. The reconfigurations expose the artistry of the sequencing of shots and edits and the rhythms of the scene.
Chase
“Anita Thacher's film was ignored by critics of avant-garde cinema because its lively deconstruction of pornography did not fit into any of the dominant critical categories of the time. »Lauren Rabinovitz
Permanent Wave
Short film by Anita Thacher
Manhattan Doorway
"A surrealistic film made with optical printed techniques about a young girl who acts as a guide on a journey aimed at recapturing childhood through the distortion of memory." - The Independent
Sea Travels
Aired on television via PBS from 1980 through 1985.
The Breakfast Table
This film opens with the sense of juxtaposition and absurdity that are the basis of Magritte's paintings, and succeeds in contributing to the surrealist tradition through subtle and powerful manipulations of the filmed image.
Homage to Magritte
A tribute to, and evocation of women no longer alive. The rituals of their daily lives are honored and memorialized through transformed images of flowers, woods, water and more. (Anita Thacher) LOST/ IN MEMORIAM's non-narrative domestic and natural imagery progresses through the rhythms and emotions of the accompanying piano music by Robert Aldridge. The rituals of women's daily lives are honored and memorialized. «...Anita Thacher's elegant, abstract tribute, LOST/ IN MEMORIAM: stylized images of tulips and waving grasses whose splendid sensuality are an apt elegy for the creative lives of friends loved and lost. Thacher evocatively quotes Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own): 'Great poets do not die; they are continuing presences.' Her film is dedicated to Francesca Woodman, Susan Loda, Susan Brockman, Yvonne Vera and Barbara Jarvis.» (Karen Cooper, Film Forum)