Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann

Born: October 12, 1939
Died: March 6, 2019
in Fox Chase/ Burholme, PA
Carolee Schneemann, a groundbreaking performance and multidisciplinary artist, has used film and video since the 1960s. Shattering taboos and redefining the notion of the erotic, she confronts sexuality, gender, and the social construction of the female body. Her seminal performances of the 1970s were as transgressive as they were influential. Schneemann continues to provoke, as she explores female sexuality in relation to art-making, ritual, and culture.

Movies for Carolee Schneemann...

Title: 70 Years of Youth Revolt
Character: Self (archive footage)
Released: November 21, 2020
Type: TV
A look back at the social movements, revolts and youth subcultures from the post-war period to the present day: after the World War II, the left-bank of Paris became a mecca for jazz and alternative living, youth culture was born with trailblazing American movies, and rock became the soundtrack to a generation that wanted to change everything.
bee
Marcel Duchamp: The Art of the Possible
Title: Marcel Duchamp: The Art of the Possible
Character: Self - Artist
Released: October 23, 2020
Type: Movie
A remarkable walk through the life and work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most important creators of the 20th century, revolutionary of arts, aesthetics and pop culture.
bee
Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back
Title: Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back
Character: Self
Released: June 22, 2018
Type: Movie
Out of the tumult and fervour of the late 1960s emerged a generation of artists who set out to start a revolution. As women around the world joined forces to fight for liberation, the formative art movement of the last four decades was about to explode into being.
bee
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor
Title: Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor
Released: February 20, 2018
Type: Movie
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives.
bee
Valie Export - Icon and Rebel
Title: Valie Export - Icon and Rebel
Character: Herself
Released: May 18, 2015
Type: Movie
She is the godmother of performance art. With her shocking public actions she created in the late 60s images that have burned into the general visual memory until today. The life and work of the Austrian artist Valie Export exemplify a development in art history in which women sought and found new ways and means of expression. Her work provides a feminist counterpart to the Viennese actionism of her time, which has influenced numerous artists of subsequent generations. The innovative diversity of her artistic approaches makes Valie Export an icon of 20th century art history.
bee
Masculinity/Femininity
Title: Masculinity/Femininity
Character: Self
Released: March 23, 2015
Type: Movie
Masculinity/Femininity is an experimental film project interrogating normative notions of gender, sexuality and performance. Shot primarily on Super 8, the project merges academic and creative critique -- a document of gender de-construction rather than a documentary about gender construction.
bee
Emma's Dilemma
Title: Emma's Dilemma
Character: Herself
Released: June 18, 2012
Type: Movie
Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills reimagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.
bee
Sleepless Nights Stories
Title: Sleepless Nights Stories
Character: Self
Released: December 15, 2011
Type: Movie
Director Jonas Mekas travels through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, galleries, bars, and clubs. Encountering old acquaintances like Ken and Flo Jacobs, Yoko Ono, friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Mr. Mekas begins the film with the words 'I can't sleep.' Who hasn't been in this situation? Sleepy and yet wide awake at the same time, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the day's exertions, the drunk, the relaxed, the dancing, the brooding, the mourning, and the pensive.
bee
Maya Deren's Sink
Title: Maya Deren's Sink
Character: Herself
Released: January 5, 2011
Type: Movie
Maya Deren's Sink, a 30 minute experimental film, is an evocative tribute to the mother of avantgarde American film. The film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Teiji Ito's family, Carolee Schneemann and Judith Malvina, float through the homes recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren's architectural and personal interior space. Clips from Maya Deren's films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed appearing on the floorboard, furniture, and in the bowl of her former sink. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know as film with its imaginary nature evokes a former time and space.
bee
!W.A.R.: !Women Art Revolution
Title: !W.A.R.: !Women Art Revolution
Character: Herself
Released: September 12, 2010
Type: Movie
Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rare, historical film and video footage, this feature documentary reveals how art addressing political consequences of discrimination and violence, the Feminist Art Revolution radically transformed the art and culture of our times.
bee
Americana I Ching Apple Pie
Title: Americana I Ching Apple Pie
Released: January 1, 2007
Type: Movie
Writes Schneemann: "The 'Americana I Ching Apple Pie' recipe was first enacted in my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972. Unfortunately, the original footage disappeared with the man doing the documentation who may have been working for the CIA. The next presentation was May '77, as a cooking event for the Heresies Magazine performance and jumble sale benefit. With the exception of a dozen apples, flour, maple syrup, and eggs which I brought, all the cooking 'material,' utensils, and props were discovered in the jumble. Objects which functionally approximated actual cooking utensils were used: nails, hammers, an arrow, a flower pot, ball bearings, rags, a watering can. The cook's apron was a ripped mini skirt with which I covered my hair. As I state in the performance, 'traditionally you need an apron, but it doesn't matter where you put it.'
bee
Women of Vision
Title: Women of Vision
Character: Self
Released: August 3, 1998
Type: Movie
Documentary that highlights 18 women and covers a period of time from the 50's to the 90's. The women chosen were selected because they represent the real diversity within both feminism and independent film and video. They range in age from 65 to 25. They are black, white, Puerto Rican, Yugoslavian, Asian American, biracial. They are straight, gay and bisexual. What they share is a need to express their own interpretations of what American culture is and could be and a belief that this work is made particularly powerful through the media.
bee
Birth of a Nation
Title: Birth of a Nation
Character: Self
Released: August 6, 1997
Type: Movie
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
bee
Ask the Goddess
Title: Ask the Goddess
Released: January 1, 1991
Type: Movie
Ask the Goddess is a provocative performance in which Schneemann interacts with the audience by responding to sexual and psychic dilemmas read from cards they have submitted. A continuous relay of projected slides comprises an iconography of Goddess symbols, taboo and sacred, including images of animal attributes. Schneemann reacts spontaneously to the questions; she channels cogent answers triggered by the unpredictable images and finds herself physically activated, turning into a howling wolf or crawling across the projection area, squealing like a pig.
bee
Home Movies 1971-81
Title: Home Movies 1971-81
Released: January 1, 1985
Type: Movie
Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
bee
Split Decision
Title: Split Decision
Character: Tracy
Released: January 1, 1979
Type: Movie
This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split decision is a boxing term used when the judges divide their votes in finding a winner. In this case the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a pick-up, and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation and modes of radical representation - between conventional continuity editing, and abstraction created through computer generated grids. The film features an appearance by Carolee Schneemann and digital imaging from before the era of personal computers.
bee
ABC - We Print Anything - In the Cards
Title: ABC - We Print Anything - In the Cards
Released: June 15, 1977
Type: Movie
Video documentation of performance of the work hosted by De Appel, Amsterdam, in 1977 and filmed by Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas. In ABC - We print anything - In the cards (1977) Schneemann documented dreams, advice and conversations relating to her shifting relationships. She collated 315 numbered cards, containing both text and photographic imagery, which she photographed from her domestic life. Schneemann (the ‘C’ in ABC) analyses her complex set of experiences separating from ‘A’ (artist Anthony McCall) while drawing closer to ‘B’ (publisher Bruce McPherson). The cards capture the dynamic, paradoxical, humorous and contrary aspects of relationships, forming an intimate yet measured set of information.
bee
Up To and Including Her Limits
Title: Up To and Including Her Limits
Released: June 9, 1976
Type: Movie
Up To and Including Her Limits extends the principles of Jackson Pollock's action painting. Schneemann is suspended from a rope harness, naked and drawing; her moving body becomes a measure of concentration, the sustained and variable movements of her extended drawing hand creates a dense web of strokes and marking. This video captures the concentration and raw intensity of Schneemann's presence and use of her own body. The piece was edited by Schneemann in 1984 from video footage of six performances: the Berkeley Museum, 1974; London Filmmaker's Cooperative, 1974; Artists Space, NY, 1974; Anthology Film Archives, NY, 1974; The Kitchen, NY, 1976; and the Studio Galerie, Berlin, 1976.
bee
Plumb Line
Title: Plumb Line
Released: July 8, 1971
Type: Movie
The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance. Sound: Carolee Schneemann. -- EAI
bee
Times For
Title: Times For
Released: October 11, 1970
Type: Movie
A sexually frustrated man complies with the emotional and erotic wishes of four women, but afterwards he is left even lonelier than before.
bee
Heads
Title: Heads
Character: Self
Released: December 19, 1969
Type: Movie
Includes 'portraits' of Marianne Faithfull, Thelonious Monk and 28 others, some known, some less so.
bee
Fuses
Title: Fuses
Released: December 31, 1967
Type: Movie
A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney; observed by the cat, Kitch.
bee
Grimace
Title: Grimace
Released: January 1, 1967
Type: Movie
Produced over several years between 1962 and 1967, Grimaces shows the faces of over a hundred artists, gallery owners and critics grimacing to the camera.
bee
No. 4
Title: No. 4
Character: Herself
Released: February 6, 1966
Type: Movie
This film consists entirely of close ups of famous persons' bottoms. Ono meant it to encourage a dialogue for world peace.
bee
Meat Joy
Title: Meat Joy
Released: May 29, 1964
Type: Movie
"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."
bee
Site
Title: Site
Released: January 1, 1964
Type: Movie
Performance by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann.
bee
Cat's Cradle
Title: Cat's Cradle
Character: Self
Released: January 1, 1959
Type: Movie
Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work with their hands, occasionally looking up. A man enters a room, a woman smiles. He sits, another man sits and smokes. The cat stretches. There are close-ups of each. The light is dim; a filter accentuates red. A bare foot stands on a satin sheet. A woman disrobes. She pets the cat. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.
bee
Loving
Title: Loving
Released: January 1, 1957
Type: Movie
In Loving (1957), a couple make love in the sun and their optic system flares -- it's really the nervous system's ecstasy -- in oranges and yellows and whites. - Stan Brakhage