PARIS IS A WOMAN (Excerpts)

PARIS IS A WOMAN is an abstract, experimental film that provokes the concept of narration. A 16mm, black and white film, the filmmaker uses optically manipulated cinematography and animated photographs to express an abiding concern for rhythm. Musical in editing style and poetic in structure, the visual language of the film's images is underscored by the original sound design of contemporary composer, Bernardo Feldman. Spiraling through the angst of the unexpected death of a parent, PARIS IS A WOMAN is a film that makes demands of its viewer. The love of a mother is deconstructed and contextualized within the framework of enraged grief. A distraught daughter engages her vulnerability at the loss of this primary relationship. Set in the sensuous city of Paris, the contrasting turmoil characterized in this screenplay stretches to the extreme the realms of the sacred and the profane.

PARIS IS A WOMAN was produced at California Institute of the Arts and École Nationale Superiéure des Arts Decoratifs (Paris). The film was partially funded by the Ahmanson Foundation, the Foundation for Creativity, Filmforum (Los Angeles), the Mexican Endowment for Culture and the Arts, and one of ten films to be awarded completion funds with the Annenberg Foundation Independent Media Grant. Received Best Experimental Short Film and Best Directorial Debut for a Short Film at New York International Film Festival; screened at Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Agnes Scott Gallery in Atlanta, and at AFI Silver Theater in Maryland.

Filmmakers comments:
PARIS IS A WOMAN is an animated film. You will find, on initial viewing, that its theatrical, live-action imagery will confront that definition. My commitment in making this film lies in extending animation and live-action well beyond previously designed roles. I explore the relationship between painting as a visual genre and animation as a film medium: it would not be incorrect to describe my filmmaking as painting in time. My research manifests in the marriage of live-action to a form of inscribed footage, figure and abstraction, celluloid and digital technology. I am in pursuit of a hybrid form of technological art that is founded on the principles of animation, and all that implies: single, frame by frame filmmaking, pacing, inscription. The nucleus of the films' rhythmic movement, dramatic timing, and photographic opticals are wholly informed by the principles of painting and animation to create inscribed movement that is not to be dismissed because the "hand"inscription was created with technology.

---- Janeann Dill [Paris Is A Woman ©1999 All Rights Reserved]