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To contact
filmmakers or to request their films, please contact the
filmmakers directly. Sarah Jane
Lapp 200 St. Marks Avenue Michelle
Fleming Amie
Siegel Jenny
Perlin Filmography
& Commissions (writer, producer, director,
editor, animator) A compilation
of seven 16mm and 35mm films which use hand - drawn
animation, live action, and experimental non - fiction to
explore the interface of religious imagination, memory,
and comic impulse. Happy are
the happy (your best joke, please,). 18 min., 16mm
War survivors tell their best jokes. (USA/Czech
Republic1999) Co - directed with Jenny Perlin The
neighborhood cat. 2 min., 16mm A hand - drawn
animation starring a cranky cat. (USA 1999) Revised
lesson plan for private Kim Jae Won. 3 min., 16mm A
care package for a Korean soldier. (USA 1997) Mimo.
15min., 16mm A memory exchange between two strangers.
(USA/Czech Republic1996) Raj. 8
min., 16mm Spirituality and faith, re - animated.
(USA/Czech Republic 1996) Mantan
elokuvavikko. 45 sec., 35mm Animated Trailer for
Mantan Elokuvaviikko Film Festival. (USA/Czech
Republic/Finland 1996) Alexander.
11 sec., 35mm Animated Trailer for Mantan Elokuvaviikko
Film Festival. (USA/Czech Republic/Finland
1996) Kites for
kate 4 min. film/video Hand - drawn animation on the
language of secrets for Kate Shaw. (USA 2000) co -
directed with Colette Sandstedt & David
Rauch Private
apology. 5 min., 16mm Live action meditation on floss
and fidelity (USA 2000) #30. 1
min., 16mm Hand - drawn anniversary animation. (USA
2000) Gaella:
Bitul 1994, 23 min. 16mm/video Interview with a young
woman from Zagreb. (USA. 1994) Print source:
please contact Sarah Jane Lapp for all films. Please note
that Jane Balfour Films no longer handles Raj or
Mimo. Mimo can also be found in The Judah L.
Magnes Museum Video Archive. 2000 Artists'
Television Access Intermedia Arts/Minneapolis MAKOR/New
York University of Baltimore/Maryland Hamline
University/Minneapolis: 'Literature, Art, & Social
Change' 1999 The
School of the Art Institute of Chicago: 'Religious
Imagination & Cinema' Happy are
the happy is currently on tour with the 2001 Black
Maria, Madcat & Women in the Director's Chair Film
Festivals. Venues include one hundred museums,
universities, libraries, cinematheques, and art centers
nationwide. 2000 The
Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Grant The
Jerome Foundation/New York Media Arts Grant 1997 - 99
School of the Art Institute of Chicago Full Merit
Scholarship, 2 Yr. MFA in Filmmaking 1994 - 95 J.
William Fulbright Fellowship/ Czech Republic Brown
University Ittleson Research & Travel
Grant 1993
University of Southern California/CEU Prague Writer's
Workshop Scholarship 1994 Winner,
College of St. Catherine's Emerging Writer's
Competition 2000 The
MacDowell Colony/New Hampshire The Atlantic Center for
the Arts/Civitella Ranieri Foundation/Italy Sarah Jane
Lapp was born in Minneapolis in 1972. She has taught
writing and film production in Chicago (Young Chicago
Authors, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and
currently lives in Brooklyn where she is working on two
new films. Life/Expectancy
- 1999 film by Michele Fleming, 16mm, black &
white/sound, 30 minutes Life/Expectancy
is a fiction. It is a non - fiction. This film is an
essay. It is a bad...but beautiful... dream. This film is
an experiment in poetic form. It is personal. It is about
no one. Cinema is the core of exploration and it is
cinema that has left her trace in a moment already gone
by the time it is seen. Can a medium experience a mid -
life crisis, or at a hundred years old, is she left only
to curse her offsprings and die? Michele
Fleming has made short format personal experimental films
for the last twenty years. Her work has been exhibited
throughout the United States and has garnered numerous
prizes over the years. Despite the pressures of
technology, demand for 'production values', or expansion
into long format or expanded co - operative work, Fleming
remains devoted to the 'hand - made' or single author
approach to filmmaking. Taking on issues as wide ranging
as exploration of memory and loss, the impact of AIDS on
the personal psyche, the poetic rendering of the cruelest
and most destructive (but often completely socially
accepted) aspects of human behavior, or the notion of
'mid - life crisis', her films remain as traces or
personal documents. Fleming is
currently an Associate Professor of Filmmaking at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has
taught for the last ten years. Previous to this time she
worked extensively as a curator of Film and
Video. 1999 Life/Expectancy b&w,
sound, 30 minutes 1995 Ornithology color,
sound, 21 minutes 1993 devotio
moderna color,
sound, 10 minutes 1990 Private
property (public domain) color,
sound, 12 minutes 1989 Left
- handed memories color,
sound, 15 minutes 1987 Tropical
depression color,
sound, 10 minutes 1984 Invitation
to the dance color,
sound, 13 minutes 1984 One
color,
sound, 1.5 minutes 1983 Other
voices, other views color,
sound, 7.5 minutes 1982 The
selves sepia,
sound, 10 minutes 1981 The
dream: a neutral necessity color,
sound, 7.5 minutes
1,950 words
Return
to Jenny
Perlin's What should I make up? An inquiry into
autobiography. Interviews with Sarah Jane Lapp,
Michele Fleming, and Amie Siegel
Filmographies
and biographical notes
Brooklyn, New York 11238
Tel: 718 - 230 - 7789 email: cinemagoat@yahoo.com
Professor, Film Dept
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112. South Michigan Ave
Chicago IL 60603
email: MFlemi@artic.edu
email: asiegel@umbc.edu
JPerlin@slc.edu
or
nilrep@hotmail.com
Sarah Jane
Lapp
Seven films
1996 - 1999
Additional
Filmography
Visiting
Artist & One - Woman Screenings
Selected
Group Screenings
Fellowships
& Grants
CEC International Partners/Artslink (NEA) Collaborative
Arts Grant w/ J. PerlinResidencies
Awards
Reviews
Education
& Professional Training
Life/Expectancy meditates on a woman's midlife
search for meaning. In order to find 'her own story' the
woman feels - in every cell of her body, to risk a
cliché, - that she must find a code of memory that
lies beyond herself, something that also involves a code
of cultural value. The Misfits, Intolerance, Sunset
Boulevard and Lady from Shanghai emerge as selected film
narratives and tales from the larger culture that draw
her in. As a visionary artist, she must excavate these
works on her own terms. She recreates brief, captivating
segments from the films in order to isolate the emotional
core and fundamental impulse of storytelling that she is
convinced these fragments bear. As the project unfolds,
the woman finds herself necessarily drawn to other
fragmentary visual frames: thorns on rose stems, light
passing on the dining room floor, flip books, a film
projector, bodies darting in public space, the blankness
provided by a fresh snow. Drawn to these external
reflections of her own demons and their uncanny power to
blend inexplicably in ways that subvert and defer
symbolic expectations, the woman realizes that there are
no grand narratives that work for her and that the heart
of midlife resides for some wanderers in glimpses of
stories that refuse to be told or, apparently, in
'footnotes' that survive the loss of the tales with which
they were once associated. This is what she has now -
vibrant footnotes to life and nothing more. However, in
these drifting remains with their curious capacity to
blend experimentally with one another she discovers the
means to sacrifice the beating warmth of a sentimental
heart and to replace it with a guarded, harsh and
eccentric wisdom that gives new form to the
psyche.'Fleming
pulls out all the stops in this bravura expiation of
maternity and middle age. Jaw dropping visuals rub up
against Orson Welles's funhouse mirror shootout in The
Lady from Shanghai and Monroe's wrestle with Clark
Gable in The Misfits. Movies are never far away here,
in this pseudo - autobiography, as noir moments of the
everyday are collaged with cut - ups from a half dozen
flicks - most notably Taylor and Burton savaging one
another in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Fleming
makes a series of hairraising turns around the scions
of psychoanalysis, easing herself from the long shadow
of her storyless mother. Ravishing, brutal and
emotive, this is one film unafraid to wear its heart
and its brains on its sleeve, and marks Fleming's
arrival as a major American filmmaking talent. If you
can't stand the heat, get out of the cinema.' -
Michael Hoolboom, curator of the Experimental Film
Section of the IMAGES Film Festival
Screened:
Biographical
notes
Personal
films:
Return to Jenny
Perlin's What
should I make up? An inquiry into autobiography. Interviews
with Sarah Jane Lapp, Michele Fleming, and Amie
Siegel
