Holly Willis

Baby Pigs and Mouseholes

Holly Willis
“Filmmaking is fun, so get going,” commands the old woman who narrates Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century. It’s the last line of Helen Hill’s 2001 animated short, which itself is about how to make films, real films, with 16 mm and Super 8......
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Danièle Huillet: The Last Resistance

Holly Willis
Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub began making films in the 1960s and continued until Huillet’s death in 2006. In their humorous 1982 short En Rachâchant, the pair adapts a story by Marguerite Duras about a boy who refuses to learn. His fretful parents take him to school to confront his......

A Quest of Origins: Larry Gottheim in Person

Holly Willis
An image: water with shards of light shimmering in a dance across the screen, the silhouettes of two children frolicking in the water shielding us intermittently from the brilliance. Meanwhile, a story is told in voice-over: Blind Willie Johnson’s widow, Angeline, recounts meeting, wooing and marrying the young musician, recalling,......
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The Intimate Distance: A Tribute to Mark Lapore

Holly Willis
Before his death in 2005, avant-garde filmmaker Mark Lapore spent many years traveling the world documenting people and places with a rare intensity and unequivocal gaze. His 35-minute black-and-white film Kolkata, for example, is a riveting poetic portrait of Calcutta featuring superlong takes of faces shot in close-up and relentless......
(Kantor/Feuer Gallery

What Visions Burn

Holly Willis
There’s a long, rich history of hand-painted films, from the intense paint-on-emulsion shorts of Stan Brakhage and Len Lye to the stories that emerge through paint in the films of Caroline Leaf. Brooklyn-based Ezra Johnson adds a new kind of entry to this history with his 22-minute What Visions Burn,......

The Moral Museum: Selections From the Bick Archive

Holly Willis
Who was Violet Bick? Movie buffs may remember her as a background character played by Gloria Grahame in Frank Capra’s 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life. For artist Cindy Smith, she’s the starting point for an investigation of gender roles and the varied threads that weave the tapestry of history......
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Decline and Fall

Holly Willis
Los Angeles–based artist and writer Erika Suderburg returns to Filmforum with her latest video, Decline and Fall (2007), a provocative examination of power and destruction that brings together World War II archival footage with more recent peace protests in Rome and Los Angeles, as well as imagery drawn from everyday......

An Evening With Gary Kibbins

Holly Willis
Film and video artist Gary Kibbins, formerly of CalArts and now teaching in the department of film studies at Queens University in Canada, returns to Filmforum with five short works, including two from 2006. Kibbins often plays with language and text, crafting incisive, frequently humorous gems akin to poetry or......
#8 (Devil: Master of Ceremonies) (Photos courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

Variety Show

Holly Willis
“That’s some fucked-up shit,” a friend of mine used to say when he really appreciated something, or sometimes, for variation, he’d announce, “That shit is fucked up.” And who could blame him? These are sturdy declarations; they neatly say all that can — or can’t — be said on a......

Online Avant-Garde

Holly Willis
Until recently, gleaning a history of experimental film and video required enrollment at a university with decent film classes, or dogged attendance at the local cinematheque (provided you lived in a big city coinhabited by dedicated curators). That’s changing — sort of. Two new Web-based endeavors are greatly expanding public......