Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Directing
Biography
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster makes highly personal poetic abstract films in 8mm and 16mm, and also from found 35mm film and HD video. She works in handpainted filmmaking and direct cinema as well as other techniques. Foster's award-winning films and videos have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Black Maria Film Festival, Rencontres, as well as other notable galleries, festivals and museums around the world and are held in the UCLA Film Archive. Author of "Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader" and director of "The Women Who Made the Movies," Foster is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies, Women's Studies and LGBT+ Studies.
Known For
Rephotographed psychedelic painted and scratched images, collaged and abstracted. An homage to underground experimental poet and filmmaker, Storm de Hirsch; one of the great unsung women in avant-garde film.
Film for Storm de Hirsch
Examines the careers of women who made a lasting contribution to film history as directors: Alice Guy Blaché, who in 1896 directed what is arguably the first plot-driven film; Ida Lupino, who also had a long career as an actor; Ruth Ann Baldwin, who directed numerous early westerns; Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's film propagandist; as well as Dorothy Davenport Reid, Lois Weber, Kathlyn Williams, Germaine Dulac, Cleo Madison and many more. Film clips, stills, and other archival materials bring their work to life.
Women Who Made the Movies
A ship on the oceans of time: a Dadaist time travel film. A hand-made split-screen film using the technique of disrupted stereoscopy and collage détournement of found images.
Dada Ship
Mass for Shut-ins. A hand-painted 16mm film. Direct animation. 8 minutes. "A fever dream. An infinitely morphing kaleidscopic stained glass window; bells that remind me of the sounds of Amsterdam, my second home after New York. Frantic REM sleep kicks in around 5 minutes..." A pandemic film made under quarantine, Spring 2020. How do we survive this pandemic? We survive through art & music.
Mass for Shut-ins
Kiki looks directly at the viewer in this exercise in Objective Chance Surrealism (automatism); a dream occult homage; a look through Kiki's eyes in her imagined "lost film." A film made from rubbish made for Kiki de Montparnasse.
Kiki’s Film
To the eerie sound of a vintage record, colour blotches saturate the frame like moving-image stained-glass windows in Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s Kitchen Sink Film, a short 16mm work of painterly psychedelia – handmade in the artist’s own kitchen sink.
Kitchen Sink Film
"Dreaming in Aspect Ratio" is a hand-made diary film and experiment in disrupted stereoscopy; an adopted "found" home movie. A playful queer self-portrait in found dream memories. An experimental documentary and Surrealist détournement. Bright colours collaged with black and white imagery of the joy of female friendships evoke dreaming and reverie; a lost queer childhood regained through the magic of cinema, disrupting typical self-portraiture and auto-ethnography.
Dreaming in Aspect Ratio
Run / Fall' is an experiment in automatism (automatic writing via chance editing) made in the spirit of Surrealism; my subconscious and chance as co- authors.