Films of Amy Halpern

Image courtesy of CCCB
The films of Amy Halpern are devoted to the pleasures of light, of perception and of the film as a medium. Their intellectual interplay, along with the aesthetics of pleasure and the resulting synesthetic associations, gives rise to intimate, melodic, sensual experiences.
As a child, Amy Halpern made compositions using light and movement, like all children. She was interested in looking at volumes, both spatial and temporal, positive and negative spaces, and their representation and/or suggestion on screen.
Starting out in New York in 1971, alone in an apartment with a camera, a projector, a splicer and a pair of rewinds, she began to compose films of texture, light, and shadow. The qualities of the medium, sensitivities of different emulsions to light, the elegant Brownian motion of the grain and the photographed gestures themselves- continue to hold her attention.
Working in 16mm, Halpern is interested in direct filming what is seen: an object, a location, a gesture, etc. She avoids dramatic manipulation, finding inherent dramas in abstraction more exciting, and defies the viewer’s expectations learned from the narrative cinema. Playing with different associative forms, she fuses moments in which one may feel movement as color, or an image as a taste.
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