B. Ruby Rich writes, "MISCONCEPTION is composed of six parts that together chronicle the experience of one woman and her husband during the course of her natural childbirth. The film communicates the precision and care with which it has been assembled. [The] structure lends the film a pacing rhythm...
A portrait: of Saul Levine, filmmaker and one-time Italian Ice Vendor./of the film surface & depth/so by the choice of image./ of the inside & outside light in the summer and the shower. –M. K.
A life-light guilt trip, tragicomic psychodrama in the film time. Made in the darkness of my year in a women's dormitory. 1969, Tufts University, Medford, Mass. –M. K.
Fleeting 8mm views of the Rhode Island coast reach beyond the home movie towards deeper mysteries of light and presence. With window-framed shots, intimate shadows and a few sly self-portraits, Marjorie Keller gestures towards a subjectivity of the light touch.
A portrait of a mother with her arms full in the backyard bathing her twin babies as the early spring light sings and dances. Later the father cooks a fish. Marjorie Keller is the mother.
Working in the diaristic mode of lyrical cinema, Marjorie Keller arranges fleeting impressions of a summer vacation as pearls on a string. Her deliberate rhyming of color and light contrasts wondrously with the incidental nature of the scenes depicted. Rockets are fired off in the backyard, mussels...
“This film began as a view out six windows in a crescendo of evocation. Each window is a layer in a different style of representation. Each view reminds me of my past… Really, it’s a self-portrait.” –Marjorie Keller
Super 8mm transfer to digital, color, sound, 5:07 minutes. Still images of things passing; a diary between city and country. Marjorie Keller and Coleen Fitzgibbon drive to Carolee Schneemann’s to feed Kitsch.
This film was shot the same weekend as Z (Zee Not Zed), when Stan Brakhage was visiting University of Rhode Island, where Marjorie Keller was teaching at the time. They get some coffee, then go for a walk on a beach in an old whaling harbor.
The first two in a series of in-camera edited films by Marjorie Keller. ANCIENT PARTS portrays the symbolic differentiation and mock conquest of a boy and his mother. FOREIGN PARTS portrays the poetics of family life in an unfamiliar context. Two joined together as one.
Georgic I: The annual produce first seen in spring. The furrowed earth ready for planting. The distribution, support and protection of young plants. The implements of the garden. Georgic II: The life of Virgil is recapitulated in summer, with a digression on the sacred. The sheep of Arcadia. The...
Begun as a document for insurance purposes, OBJECTION catalogues the contents of a house with ever-increasing horror. The soundtrack carries the voices and sounds of the family unseen.
HEREIN charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman's autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side in New York, street prostitution and drug addiction, all inflect...
“This film doesn’t get anywhere…just like adolescence. The hair comes off, the hair goes on, the hairdresser moves this way and that, the music comes on again and again, Kathy and Steve do and don’t break up, it’s all true, it’s all a lie. I want people to be as free as possible when...
DEPARTURE is a film that was shot in 1976-77 during a year when I lost my job due to both cutbacks at the campus at which I taught and my involvement in the movement against them. I collected footage and imagined I would edit the film together the night I left. I was unable to do this and it took...
