On Friday, November 14th, at 7pm, join us at The Film-Makers’ Cooperative (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) for a program of illusory, water-themed films by visual artist Ann Deborah Levy. The filmmaker will be in attendance to discuss her work and answer audience members’ questions.

The centerpiece of the program consists of two 16mm films, Levy's 52 minute WATERSCAPE: illusions and the shorter Watercolors, 13 minutes, both 2007; in which she began explorations in two directions that influenced all of the films she has made since. WATERSCAPE, set on a mysterious wilderness lake and seemingly about filming swans and swan mythology, is a meditation on illusion and reality and filmmaking as myth-making. In Watercolors, shot on the same location, Levy zeroes in on the reflections on the surface of the water that play a part in WATERSCAPE, engaging light, color, texture and rhythm, to show what these reflected images reveal and distort of the surrounding location. Her later digital films, Rain Painting, 6 minutes, 2014, and WATER FALLS, New York City, 12 minutes, 2019, continue her visual investigations but also illustrate how the camera, depending on where it focuses, plays a role in how her images are created. While plumbing the fluidic and illusory possibilities of the surface image and layers of perception, Levy invites viewers to superimpose their own visions and associations onto the canvas of her work.

WATERSCAPE: Illusions, appears to be about a woman filming a mysterious body of water and its swans, but it is a meditation on illusion and reality in filmmaking and in human existence. Levy remarks, “I am fascinated by the ways the human mind distorts reality in perception, memory, and imagination. In [this film] I introduce a range of observers — all really voices in the thoughts of the woman shaping the film: the filmmaker reading from her filming diary, a little girl trying to recite a tongue twister rhyme about a swan, older girls trading swan myths, a scholar discussing swan symbolism, and swan 'experts,' from ancient times to modernity, debating across history whether the swan sings before it dies. To this mix the filmmaker adds her own fairy tale. Just as these voices keep their individual identities in the filmmaker’s thoughts, I keep them as separate strands but weave them through the film. Against these onlookers, the swans follow their daily routines and raise their young. As these scenarios play out and form the fabric that is the film, a common theme of disparity between human observation and reality is revealed. Even the film, as document of reality, becomes suspect. Individual viewers will find their own meanings, rhythms, and connections among these threads."

In Watercolors, a silent film, nature creates a continually changing painting on the surface of a pond that mirrors but also alters details of the landscape surrounding it. Beginning in the late winter, just before leaves appear on the trees, the film records the changes in weather and foliage throughout a year. The images provide visual cues from which viewers can imagine their own sound tracks — a music of the sounds of wind and water.

The program will conclude with the two later digital works by Levy. Rain Painting conveys rain striking car windows and “painting” the landscape beyond, thereby re-imagining the external environment in a variety of moods, colors, and abstract patterns. WATER FALLS, New York City reimagines the traditional “city symphony,” wherein the camera captures impressionistic paintings made by water falling, flying, and flowing from New York City fountains.

About the filmmaker: Ann Deborah Levy’s visually arresting, award-winning films and videos have screened in the US and internationally. Screenings in alternative venues include: Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, New York; UnionDocs, Brooklyn, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York City; The Film-Makers' Cooperative, New York City; Moving Image Art, Pasadena, California; and Cellular Cinema, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Festival screenings in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and South America include Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ohio; Wide Open Experimental Film Festival, Oklahoma; Transient Visions Film Festival, New York; Moviate Underground Film Festival, Pennsylvania; Oxford Film Festival, Mississippi; Another Experiment By Women Film Festival, New York City; Bideodromo International Experimental Film Festival, Bilbao, Spain; Postales a Lumière, Caracas, Venezuela; and Female Eye Film Festival, Toronto; Canada, among others. Levy comes to filmmaking by way of painting and photography and has been a recipient of both Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships.

In addition to her own work, Levy has been active in film preservation since 2013. A former Co-Chair and still active member of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, she has programmed several preservation screening series, most notably: Artists and Activists: Second Wave Feminist Filmmakers, a six-program mini-festival at the Barbican Centre, London; Selected Animated and Experimental Works from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, a 3-part miniseries at Anthology Film Archives; and Visions: TV Dramas by Maya Angelou and Momoko Iko in the series "Changing the Picture" at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Program:

1. Watercolors, 2007, silent, original format 16mm film, 13 minutes
2. Rain Painting, 2014, HD video, 6 minutes
3. WATER FALLS, New York City, 2019, HD video, 12 minutes
4. WATERSCAPE: illusions, 52 minutes, original format 16mm film, 52 minutes

Total run time: 83 minutes.

Followed by a discussion and Q&A with the filmmaker, moderated by Matt McKinzie.