Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Shape of the Gaze, The

    A hand-processed and optically printed film. I manipulate the film process to disrupt viewing expectations on a textual and aesthetic level. This re-positions the subject and discourse of gender ambiguity available in the gaze. Specifically, I attempt to interrupt and re-shape the triadic gaze operating between the subject, viewer and filmic apparatus. By shifting the discourse of the gaze, the film implicates viewers in the gazes between the lesbian filmmaker and her self-identified butch subjects. “Post riot-grrl ethos informed a number of the best works… [including] Maïa Cybelle Carpenter’s hand-processed vision of lesbians and machines, ‘The Shape of the Gaze.’”…

  • Site Visit

    Entirely hand-processed and hand-painted, “Site Visit” visually evokes a series of fantasy maps and the imaginary “sites” visited by following the paths laid out. Metaphorically the process of the film depicts the impossibility of concretely mapping disease in the human body, especially the emotional consequences. The degradation of the emulsion through bleaching is parallel to the slow degradation that occurs in the body stricken with cancer.

  • All the Great Operas (in 10 Minutes)

    Using Monty-Pythonesque animation, this film serves up the stripped-down essence of the most famous operas in a quick and painless manner, and reveals once and for all that opera has more in common with soap opera and pulp fiction than anyone likes to admit.

  • Late

    Radio evangelist Sister Agnes Phillips dispenses wisdom and hope to lost souls against a late-night urban landscape of seedy hotels and dial-a-saviour billboards. Awards: Detroit Film Center Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2004

  • Nocturnal Admissions

    A home’s movie. A 153-year-old home collects and reveals the traces it inhabitants have left behind. A contemplation of the home-movie genre, “Nocturnal Admissions” explores the idea of home as a vessel of remembrance, silently collecting and holding the experiences of those who have lived there. An assimilation of old and new , it meshes past and present homes, film and digital technology, and a nostalgia which invokes the future.

  • Something Else

    Fun things happen when you play with yourself. Change is one of them.

  • Urban Creatures

    In a city park, two silver creatures dance the passion and sorrow of the urban landscape.

  • Ladies Room

    “Ladies Room” reveals young women in their most intimate environment – the bathroom. From sterile public schools to underground warehouse raves and glitzy hotel rooms, it takes an insightful, playful and provocative look at a group of NYC girls in a variety of situations and bathrooms. Seen through the lens of fiction, documentary and satire, the range of their experiences and emotions – straddling strength and vulnerability – defines growing up female. Special Jury Award, Arizona International Film Festival, 2004

  • Body Scares

    “Body Scares” is a journey through four generations of women. Generation after generation the body is printed with secrets and wears all the memories of the past.

  • ZERO the inside story

    On a journey to find the origins of the number zero, a woman discovers more than she was expecting. The journey begins as a quest for the cultural roots of zero and how this concept touches human consciousness in unexpected ways. The search leads her to India, said to be the birthplace of the mysterious number, and the ancient city of Varanasi. There she maps her inner world onto the powerful mix of Hindu ritual and spirituality she encounters, finally confronting a traumatic event in her past. More than a film about the number that is not, “ZERO the inside…