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Film Description
Jo Ann Kaplan is an acclaimed prize-winning filmmaker whose work has been exhibited in galleries, cinemas, festivals and on television worldwide for the past 40 years. Her work is marked by an extraordinary diversity of forms which includes animation, dance film, fiction, and experimental film, as well as documentaries and arts programmes. Inspiration for her work comes from equally diverse sources: the imagery of Georges Bataille, Robert Burton’s classic text on Melancholy, and the seminal films of Maya Deren.
Body of Work is a selection of Jo Ann Kaplan’s most personal films, including her authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker Maya Deren, released for the first time on DVD, and two recently completed films, one in the form of a dance and the other as an ongoing painting. This collection is accompanied by a newly commissioned essay from Lucy Reynolds.
Contains: Invocation: Maya Deren (1986, 53 mins) - a documentary about the American avant-garde filmmaker of 1940s/50s. Narrated by Helen Mirren, this is the story of a brief but remarkable life, and of a seminal body of cinematic work which has influenced and formed the beginning and subsequent direction of American independent and artists’ filmmaking practice.
Story of I (1997): A woman sits alone in a bare, white-tiled bath, reading Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. The bizarre events described by the text provoke a series of fantasies in which the room becomes a stage and the woman the main player.
An Anatomy of Melancholy (2000): A cinematic meditation on mortality which takes the form of an anatomy book in the process of being made.
OneTwoThree (2010): A dance film choreographed and performed by Dana Caspersen and Thomas McManus of Ballet Frankfurt/Bill Forsythe Company.
Watching Paint Dry (2010): A work in on-going progress. Painted, filmed and edited by Jo Ann Kaplan, documenting and reflecting on the artist’s own ageing, to be up-dated and developed at points in the future.
