Breaking the Frame

Film Screening: Breaking the Frame
With an introduction and Q&A with B. Ruby Rich.  

In conjunction with the Grey Art Gallery exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s.

Wednesday, November 2, 6:30 PM

Michelson Theater
Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10003

Breaking the Frame
(Marielle Nitoslawska, 2012, 100 min.)
This documentary profiles Carolee Schneemann, a pioneer of performance, body art, and avant-garde cinema. Schneeman’s own collaged and diaristic approach to cinema is mirrored in Nitoslawska’s intimate portrait of her.

With an introduction and Q&A by B. Ruby Rich, professor, Social Documentation Program and Film & Digital Media Department, UC Santa Cruz.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies, the Center for Media, Culture, and History, and Grey Art Gallery.

Free and open to the public.   

Praise for Breaking the Frame:

A work about a formidable artist that is itself an important work of art.
– Mark McElhatten, Views from the Avant-Garde, New York Film Festival.

Breaking the Frame plunges you into Ms. Schneemann’s past and present with few of the usual documentary signposts.
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times.

Director Marielle Nitoslawska's faith in the power of imagery over pedantic expo-sition rewards the audience with a heady catalogue of Schneemann's luscious paintings, visceral hand-illustrated journals and excerpts from her corporeal films. Nitoslawska achieves her own form of engaging delirium by marrying her kaleidoscopic footage with overlapping conversations and a musical score by the avant-garde composer James Tenney.
– R.C. Baker, The Village Voice.

 Nitoslawska deserves special credit for the way her film is about more than the artist’s oeuvre and impact without resorting to mawkish biography.
– David Cohen, ARTCRITICAL.

Elliptical in its account, Breaking the Frame rhymes with the sensual quality of Schneeman's own body of work, framed as revelatory.
– Artspace: New Art Documentaries to Watch in 2014

Moving trains, changing seasons and Schneemann’s cat on the windowsill, watching, always watching, advance like stepping-stones along a symbolic laby-rinth, navigating Schneemann’s art and life.
– Joyce Beckenstein, The Brooklyn Rail

 The effect is haunting and hallucinatory, particularly when viewed in the dark of a cinema.
– Iain Millar, The Art Newspaper.

Nitoslawska crafted a total artwork evoking an epochal tonality. Breaking the Frame functions as an amalgamation of poem, dream journal, photo album, labor-atory log, cultural memento, archeological dig, and liberation manual for an era of artistic experimentation and confrontation. In short, it is as much a cultural time capsule as a biographical testament.
– G. Roger Denson, Huffington Post.