Barbara Sternberg Trailers
Burning TrailerAntigone Trailer
Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Ontario Cinematheque, Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries including the University of Guelph, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Dunlop Art Gallery, as well as the Universite d'Avignon, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life- questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video.
Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists' film and video exhibition group. She wrote a handbook and conducted workshops on Media Literacy for high school teachers. She recently organized the "Association for Film Art" (AFFA) to actively support and promote awareness and appreciation of film art. While living in the Maritimes, Sternberg co-founded Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Sternberg wrote a column, "On (experimental) Film" for several years for Cinema Canada, and has written essays on artists and on filmmakers. As well, she has written on the status of film art in galleries and museums—an issue on which she has conducted symposia and lobbied vigorously.
Most Popular Barbara Sternberg Trailers
Total trailers found: 38
27 December 1990
“Shot in an abandoned warehouse, documenting a contemporary adaptation of the Oedipus story by a group of Toronto experimental filmmakers, Antigone is both a documentary about searching for meaning and validity in the old story, and a fiction about the failure to find any value but parody.
01 February 2023
touch (ing), -(ed): Feel, move, affect, be in contact, tangent to, in relation; injure slightly; slightly crazy "My window tonight casts light out onto the snow, I cast from my eye a glance, a touchless touch.
01 January 2007
"Poetry, film, light, life. An excerpt from Rilke's Ninth Elegy [...] evokes the beauty and brevity of life.
17 April 2020
The day as it went along – feeling the light of the present…what else is there?
01 January 2007
Brief moments of being, fleeting bits out of the surrounding chaos. These 4 shorts films can be shown separately or one after the other on the roll.
01 January 1991
The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger; and the pressure of history on one’s identity-how do I identify myself as “I”, how as part of a “we”? The film is visual, perceptual; it was made in awe of the world that goes on with and without us and of our personal, human struggles.
01 January 1996
A dog and two cats in France living, naturally.
01 January 2003
The sensual, with its beauty and possibility of decay, is set beside immutable statues of the Virgin Mary.
01 January 2010
vers(ing) opens in a coffee shop. People, sit, enter and exit. A conversation is heard. The video continues, traveling through the streets of a city, to a park, to other coffee shops, other places.
01 January 2004
Our busy comings and goings, on the move, working at life are pictured, but layers of images and scratched emulsion make viewing through the depths an effort.
01 January 2014
Goethe’s colour theory dealt with the optics of colour relations; Rudolf Steiner’s and Kandinsky’s theories attribute emotional, musical, and spiritual affects to colour; North American Natives see personality traits and states of mind, seasons, races, and the four directions in the four colours: red, yellow, white, black.
01 January 2014
Brief moments of being, fleeting bits of the surrounding chaos.
01 January 2019
There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose almost-not-there paintings dovetail with the space I find myself in at this stage of life: at the frontier between youth and old age, not all-is-still-to-come but not all-is-over yet either; and the spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr, particularly her later swirling treetops and skies.
01 January 2014
Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating – emotions which conflict, confuse, are difficult to reconcile.
01 January 2011
The central image of in the nature of things is the Forest- sometimes fearful, sometimes a refuge, always mysterious, and the multiple associations and myths embedded in it- myths within which we live and which live within us- our collective history.
01 January 2010
A short video documentary by Barbara Sternberg, approximating the dual-screen approach of the titular filmmaker.
01 January 1997
In midst, Barbara Sternberg has made a lyrical film about attachment, integration, belonging. Many of the familiar elements of Sternberg's work are here: speed, pulsing rhythms, explosions of colour, light and shape, images of nature and the built environment.
01 January 1997
A bedroom (and life) viewed from the horizontal, while wondering whether to join in the race or wake up to the illusion.
01 January 2017
Videoed off projected super 8 footage, this short film in four parts (titles from Artaud: “ the earth in the sea, the air in the earth, the fire in the water, the water in the air”) is suggestive of, on some level, the interrelatedness of everything.
01 January 2004
Where does 'I' leave off and the 'world' begin; when does 'past' end and 'present' begin? Images blurring boundaries suggest the relatedness of being.
01 January 1979
Opus 40” is about repetition: repetition in working and living, repetition through multiplicity and series, repetition to form pattern and rhythm, repetition in order and in revealing.
01 January 2014
Constructed with repetitions and variations, in reference to the musical form of a Nocturne, “Far From” is an accumulation of layers, a density of living, the noise of existence.
01 January 2008
Images flutter and flicker in orgasmic rhythms. Visual references to Bataille’s “solar anus”, to romantic coupling, to monkeys and man are held together within the sustaining dichotomy of beginnings and endings.
01 January 1994
To get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts - Under this central trope of 'beating', with its combined negative and positive implications, the film brings together the individual personally lived and the communal, historic perspective; hatred and forgiveness; laughing and crying.
01 January 1990
This film is about love - relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is personal, though anonymous, or singular.
01 January 1988
The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a library who reads only what others have left behind.
01 January 2004
Emotions come & go; so do people. The world is an awful & awesome place; so is the mind. We hear dark inner thoughts of a person & see people taking in the first spring sun in a public park in Toronto.
01 January 2016
Ideas about how we live in the world as humans, the difficulties faced, the conditions of our brief existence, accompany us consciously or unconsciously, overtly or subliminally as we go about our daily lives.
13 March 1997
A mini-presentation of consciousness dealing with cosmos. The world in a grain of sand. Connections between life, death, and the world are neither static nor symmetrical but flowing and intuitive.
01 January 2008
After Nature, after the Fall, after all - where do we go from here? Digital imagery and optically printed superimpositions combine in a cascading plunge to no(w)here – new beginnings or more of the same?
01 January 2002
"Your life is like a candle burning. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning." (Sri Sri Ra)
01 February 2023
Based loosely on the tripartite plan of Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), the film was made by applying cyanotype chemistry to blank film exposed to sun.
13 April 2021
Anything is Everything is composed of sequences of disparate footage, but with threads to follow: circular shapes from outer and terrestrial space; animals and humans; words and ideas.
01 October 1999
"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning).
11 May 1982
Transitions is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being in-between-between falling asleep and being awake, between here and there, between being and non-being.
01 January 2025
“Elemental Vision or a film for the rest of my life" is 'about' light and time - moments captured in their passing, light events shot in various rhythmic patterns.
