Barbara Sternberg is one of Canada’s most distinctive and innovative media artists. Sternberg’s extensive and impressive artistic practice has been an inspiration to many artists across Canada and internationally. Since her very first film Opus 40 (1979), her work has received significant critical praise, and has screened widely in North America and Europe, including such prestigious institutions as the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). According to New York critic and writer Stuart Liebman “since 1990, Canada has not had a more distinguished representative of its culture in this field than Barbara Sternberg…She has become one of that rare group of Canadian filmmakers – Wieland, Snow, Elder – to have acquired a truly exceptional international reputation for artistic excellence.”[1] Also her performances, media art installations and videos have been featured in numerous exhibitions. Her films were acquired for the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Queen’s University and York University.
Sternberg’s contribution to Canadian cinema and arts as a woman is of tremendous importance. As William Wees notes, “women were, at best, marginally represented in the world of Canadian experimental film when Sternberg started making films. The recognition they received was instrumental in opening a predominantly male preserve to the work of female film and video-makers, many of whom have profited from her trail-blazing efforts without, I suspect, realizing who helped to open the way for them."[2] Her films are unique in that they bring into Canadian cinema a female aesthetic sensibility. Sternberg “explores the psychic architecture of a woman’s place. How do the spaces in which we dwell both express our desires and control them?”[3]. However, Sternberg’s films are not limited to a feminine perspective, they are above all humanist. Put simply, Sternberg’s films look at how we are as humans in the world, expressed in a rich and vibrant filmic language. She has a rare ability to see and show where film’s essential properties – time, light, repetition – intersect with and illuminate the big questions of the human condition.
Sternberg constructs her films in a deeply intuitive way. They present fields of force and energy, of multiple possibilities. Sternberg’s films are not just experimental, they are experiential. “It’s a question of sinking into it, absorbing it viscerally, soaking it up intellectually and emotionally. A whole body/brain response. Nothing less”[4]. As such Sternberg’s films push the boundaries of all the visual arts by countering the ironic and anti-aesthetic tendencies in postmodern art. We should understand her films as “sites and occasions for contemplation, often shot through with anxiety, but laced with moments of tenuous beauty.”[5]
Sternberg’s particular interest in perception includes a bodily as well as a visual apprehension of the world, and raises questions such as how time presses on us in the form of history, memory, repetition, movement, presence. “Barbara Sternberg has found inspiration in the experimental prose of the great modernist writers who sought through verbal language to make palpable the rhythms of women's desire...She makes films that draw together complex networks of images and cultural references to touch and move, working to change perceptions and to reorder the world."[6] In her work, past and future crowd the mind in layers of superimposed images and sounds (Sternberg’s stylistic trademark). Writing about four films by Sternberg, Rae Davis explains: “In a way it often seems that images are not selected, but caught, implying a world much bigger and infinitely more complex than what the eye of the camera can see. There is the knowable (or seeable, touchable) – specific, fleeting, electric with moving light and shadow – and the unknowable, all that lies beyond, around and under what is seen momentarily.”[7] Paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, it is always interesting to see how in Sternberg’s films the creative power at once, brings the whole universe to order.
Barbara Sternberg has developed a distinctive style often using Super-8 images transferred to 16 mm by painstaking optical printing. Sternberg alters the original photographed image, to work against the glossy surface, to mess it up. She sees perfection as a barrier. The stark beauty that film is capable of, the perfectly lit and well-composed shot, these are, for Sternberg, ways to turn reality into image, thus separating the viewer from involvement.[8] She is interested in images that bear the traces of life, body, and the materiality of film.
Sternberg is an honest filmmaker. Her films reflect on life with no ready answers or comforting resolutions. Her films tackle big questions, the paradoxes and contradictions of living everyday - living with the knowledge of death - the mystery that is life. The theme of creation and dissolution introduced in Tending Towards the Horizontal (1988) was revisited in Like a Dream that Vanishes (2000), one of Sternberg’s most acclaimed works. The philosophical underpinning of all her work is made explicit here in philosopher John Davis’ discussion of David Hume on miracles. Towards the end of the film, Davis concludes that our present condition is perhaps more like the ancient condition of philosophy as “beginning in wonder”. Sternberg’s film is in the same spirit of wonder and acceptance of incompleteness, uncertainty, impermanence. As William Wees wrote about this film, formally it “shows an artist in complete command of her medium; thematically, it reveals a bemused but sympathetic, analytical but humane observer of everyday life.”[9] Acclaimed filmmaker Phil Hoffmann adds: “I am always moved by the vast array of experiences she offers me as a viewer, yet there is always the same shimmering light which prevails: the ‘soul’ of her work…Like a Dream offers us the opportunity to converse jointly and equally with the heart and the mind.”[10] Sternberg’s work with film over the years reveals a development in her sense of the potential of the medium and how it corresponds to our experience of and thinking about life. In her films the emotional and political blend, in an intense, unique cinematic experience coaxing questions from the viewer about issues of our time, both universal and personal.
As her work developed through the late 80’s and early 90’s, and the structuralist movement in experimental film had run its course, “Sternberg advanced the ‘formalist’ project by introducing to it passionate commitment to the interplay of history and memory, within the politics of the everyday. Recent works move towards a delicate, evanescent structure of fleeting and subtle moments. Currently, with the proliferation of digital media in conventional and artistic production, Sternberg has committed once again to understand and develop a thoughtful language for the new media. Since 2002, she has embraced a wide range of audio-visual expression, from single channel video, to installation, to hand processed 16mm, to digital media and performance. This new work is engaged in finding the links between technological process and aesthetic production.”[11] Always at the forefront, with a unique vision that probes the way we see, and the way we are taught to see, Barbara Sternberg is an artist of great dedication, intelligence, talent and grace. In 2011, recognizing her valuable contribution to Canadian art, she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
For more info see Barbara Sternberg’s website: http://www.barbarasternberg.com
[1] Stuart Liebman, support letter GG Award Nomination.
[2] William Wees, support letter GG Award Nomination.
[3] Marchessault, Janine. Catalogue Fabulous Fringe Film, Durham Art Gallery, 2004.
[4] Davis, Rae “ Panorama: 4 films by Barbara Sternberg” in Like a dream that vanishes: the films of Barbara Sternberg, edited by Mike Hoolboom, 2000.
[5] Zryd, Michael catalogue essay, Recent Work from the Canadian Avant-Garde,
Art Gallery of Ontario, 1988.
[6] Barbara Godard, support letter GG Award Nomination.
[7] Davis, Rae “Panorama: 4 films by Barbara Sternberg” in Like a dream that vanishes: the films of Barbara Sternberg, edited by Mike Hoolboom, 2000. The films discussed here are: A Trilogy (1985), Tending Towards the Horizontal (1988), Through and Through (1991) and Beating (1995).
[8] Sternberg, Barbara , artist statement: http://www.barbarasternberg.com
[9] Wees, William “Everyday Wonders in Barbara Sternberg's Like a Dream that Vanishes” POV #41-2: winter 2001.
[10] Phil Hoffman, support letter GG Award Nomination.
[11] Phil Hoffman, support letter GG Award Nomination.
Film and video work includes1979 Opus 40 (15 minutes 16mm)
1980 "...The Waters are the Beginning and End of All Things” (7 minutes 16mm)
1981 (A) Story (15 minutes super-8)
1982 Transitions (10 minutes 16mm)
1985 A Trilogy (46 minutes 16mm)
1988 Tending Towards the Horizontal (32 minutes 16 mm)
1990 At Present (18 minutes 16mm)
1992 Through and Through (63 minutes 16 mm)
1995 Beating (64 minutes 16mm)
1996 C'est La Vie (10 minutes, 16mm)
1996 What Do You Fear? (5:30 minutes 16mm released on video only)
1997 Awake (3 minutes, super-8)
1997 Midst (70 minutes, 16mm, silent)
2000 Like a Dream that Vanishes (40 minutes, 16mm)
2002 Burning (7 minutes, 16mm, silent)
2004 Surfacing (10.5 minutes, 16mm)
2005 Praise (24 minutes 16mm, silent)
2007 Once (3 minutes 16mm silent, with sound preface)
2007 Time Being I – IV (8 minutes, 16mm, silent)
2008 After Nature (11 minutes, 16mm, sound)
2008 Beginning and Ending (7 minutes, 16mm, silent)
2011 In the nature of things (45 min, 16 mm)
Awards:
1980 Opus 40, Best Experimental Film, International Super 8 Festival, Toronto
1982 Transitions, Best Experimental Film, Best Sound, Atlantic Film Festival, Halifax
1993 Through and Through, Award of Excellence, Ann Arbor Festival
2011 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts