A Community Collaborations Event

Presented in partnership with Bijou Film Board and Hannah Bonner

Positioned in conversation with Iowa City writer Hannah Bonner's book of poetry of the same name, Another Woman is a program of experimental shorts that explore the traces, absences, and embodiment of women onscreen. Featuring films by Peggy Ahwesh, Carl Elsaesser, Sally Lawton, Jean Sousa, and Sofia Theordore-Pierce, Another Woman asks: do erasures of these bodies connote violence? Tenderness? Where does the body (re)assert itself sonically, physically, or on the material of the film strip itself?

SWISH
(1982, USA, 3 min.) Dir. Jean Sousa | 16mm

This film is a silent investigation of the medium of film's relationship to motion, offering occasional, swishing glimpses of young Sousa as she dances with her moving camera, her face close to the open shutter, examining the female body at close range providing an intimacy and eroticism, that highlights the subjectivity of being close.

THE COLOR OF LOVE
(1994, USA, 10 min.) Dir. Peggy Ahwesh | 16mm

Peggy Ahwesh re-edits and optically prints a Super 8 stag loop, rarifying the degraded images into an abstract stained-glass mosaic. From a clumsy and heavy handed pornographic film of the seventies that bad storage conditions have deteriorated over time, Peggy Ahwesh uses the alterations and the mold of the film to emphasize the sensuality of the scenes. It produces a newborn beautiful film—powerful, erotic and disarming at a time.

THE RED TIDE
(2022, USA, 8 min) Dir. Sally Lawton

The Red Tide follows a life changing move to Florida. Exploring a new home located near famous earthworks by Robert Smithson, the enormous art collection-turned-museum of John Ringling, and beaches plagued by a toxic phenomenon called the ‘red tide’. Beginning with a recreation of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1969 film, Swamp, the film describes a confusion between multiple anxieties: art’s legacy, climate change, and a longing to stay connected.

HOME WHEN YOU RETURN
(2021, USA, 30 min.) Dir. Carl Elsaesser

A double exposure, a portrait of a body, a house that oscillates between its narrative past and its literal presence. The melodramatic, 1950s films of amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin are psychically projected onto the house in which the director's grandmother raised seven kids as it is cleaned out and put up for sale after she passed away. Upholding the narrative structures of melodrama that often center around men, even when the films are about women, the film asks the viewer, as Thurber says in her introduction, to pay attention to the peripheries

EXTERIOR TURBULENCE
(2023, USA, 11 min.) Dir. Sofia Theodore-Pierce

Seizure dreams, horses, and long distance conversations from bed. Loose reenactments from Marguerite Duras Baxter, Vera Baxter. A year of stormy weather and temporal rupture recalled in fragments. Featuring the director's mother and other star crossed lovers.