Now Available: New Digitizations of Five Films by Sharon Couzin
Posted February 13th, 2025 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is pleased to announce that new digitizations of five films by Sharon Couzin are now available!
Sharon Couzin (1943-2019) was a Chicago experimental filmmaker, painter, and poet who began making films in the early 1970s. Her work is known for its complex visual layering that reflects a personal, autobiographical point of view. The magazine Jump Cut said of her, “Sharon Couzin works within a tradition of autobiography, personal vision and imaginative art” which “expresses the experience of being a woman in a recognizable but fresh and challenging way.” Couzin’s films explore dreams, distortion, ritual, repetition and rhythm, time and mortality, movement and stillness, form and structure, girlhood and gender roles, domestic life as a weapon.
In addition to her filmmaking work, Couzin was a significant figure in building and promoting the experimental film community in Chicago. In 1983, while teaching filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Couzin helped found the Experimental Film Coalition, an organization that held regular monthly screenings, created the Onion City Film Festival and published several periodicals. Couzin served as the Coalition’s President until 1988.
With thanks to Gradiva Couzin, Odilon Couzin, and Ross Meckfessel. Digitization by Negativeland.
Shells and Rushes (1987, 13.5 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
“The lush and mysterious realm evoked by SHELLS AND RUSHES recalls the uncanny eclecticism of the surrealists. Strange, flesh-like sea shells, restlessly turning and quivering; enigmatic allusions to classical mythology, such as the Birth of Venus and Leda and the Swan; and paradoxical uses of positive and negative space variously bring to mind Man Ray, Dali and Cornell. But Couzin’s film creates its own rich, secretive world and provides its own astonishing pleasures. Accompanied by an otherworldly soundtrack of ancient throat-singing, this deftly edited film is by turns seductive, humorous and serene.” – Rafael Wang
Salve (1981, 14 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
“There’s a paradox at the center of Couzin’s work, in that for all of the wariness of form and order her films express, they remain tightly organized, elegant formal studies. … SALVE is her most paradoxical film and, I think, her richest. A young girl’s discovery of ‘the relationships between the quantities’ – of geometry, volume, time, and numbers – is seen as an ineffably tragic development.” – Dave Kehr
A Trojan House (1981, 25 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
“Architectural structures become the structures of relationships, establishing the windows of communication (between parents and children, between lovers) while preserving a sense of enclosure, isolation.” – Dave Kehr
Deutschland Spiegel (1980, 12 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
DEUTSCHLAND SPIEGEL is a film of light, shadow, air, stone, fences, soldiers, roads. And words. Footage from old German newsreels and parallel personal footage is edited and optically printed into counterpoint with images of a young boy. The loss of innocence is the boy’s, the burden of understanding is ours. (Warning: contains proofs that things close in upon us without our noticing.)
Roseblood (1974, 8 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
Images of a woman in dance, in flora, in picture, in eyes, in architecture, in sunshine, in color, in crystal, in space, in confusion, in danger, in disintegration, in her hand, in birth, in the Valley of Sorrow, in the sea, in repetition, in sculpture and in herself.
