Now Available: Three 16mm Films by LeAnn Bartok
Posted May 13th, 2025 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Films, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is thrilled to announce that new 16mm prints of three films by LeAnn Bartok are now available. This new acquisition includes two of Bartok’s renowned Skyworks films, as well as her final film, Film Painting I.
A pioneering conceptual visionary artist, painter, filmmaker, sculptor, poet, actress, and inventor (U.S. patent liquid crystal), LeAnn Bartok (1937-2001) graduated from the Mercy Hospital School of Nursing, in Pittsburgh, PA. After appearing in early-1960s Japanese Yakuza films, Bartok went to create a series of conceptual “SKYWORKS” projects in the 1970s; a dramatic art form which consisted of gigantic and symbolic streamers of paper and fabric, dropped from airplanes to make towering, transitory drawings using the entire sky as her own personal canvas. She originally began working in film as a way of documenting such events, including camera footage taken by skydivers who accompanied the dangerous drops.
In 1975, Bartok received a National Endowment of the Arts grant for $6,025 to do a large-scale environmental art performance. In response, she was the recipient of Senator William Proxmire’s notorious “Golden Fleece” award for the controversial NEA grant. Media coverage of the debate was intense and polarizing, inspiring people like Bill Judson, the curator of the film section of the Carnegie Museum of Art to speak out for Bartok. The NEA’s chairperson, Nancy Hanks, spoke in defense of the grant, explaining it was awarded in order to “document on film an event designed to alter an audience’s immediate environment for a short period of time.” Bartok elaborated, “I’m trying to take the spectator in and out of the planet with monumental aerial drops, ever increasing our perceptions of space. It helps people discover the dual nature of man.”
The artist also collaborated with NASA on a proposed “SPACEWORKS” project involving the Aurora Borealis. Bartok participated in numerous national and international art exhibitions, including the opening of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
In Bartok’s own words, her work “is in essence the uncovering of what is simply already there – not new visual ideas but the recognition of the spirit, the light, the process reshaping and animating the spiritual life of the kingdom resulting in a new world order, the long sought and sung Peaceable Kingdom.”
After Film Painting I, Bartok would continue working in painting and sculpture for the rest of her career, but her films remain some of the most known works she created as a seminal member of Pittsburgh Filmmakers.
The release of these new 16mm distribution prints is dedicated to LeAnn’s daughter, Shari Bartok, a tireless champion and cheerleader for LeAnn’s art and filmmaking, who passed away earlier this year.
Special thanks to the family of LeAnn Bartok, Mark Toscano and the Academy Film Archive.
Skyworks: Three Mile Drop – Light, Lighten, Lightning (1976, 16 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)
The second film in the Skyworks trilogy is a further exploration of light and sound, abstract images of lightning, fire, cracked earth, sparks and the filmmaker, LeAnn Bartok, dressed in white with outstretched arms walking on white sands intercut with skydivers and streamers falling out of airplanes to create the artist’s signature Skyworks or free-falling undulating art in the sky. Making the film more evocative is a soundtrack performed by rubbing and banging a tape recorder against ice and using an antique gong to punctuate imagery.
Skyworks: Multiple Mile Drop (1976, 21 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)
The third and final film in the Skyworks trilogy is a further abstract exploration of elemental and spiritual themes linking rhythmic intercutting and double exposures of the filmmaker, LeAnn Bartok, walking on the beach in a cowboy hat engulfed in seagulls with skydivers leaping out of planes over the desert holding and releasing streamers to create the artist’s singular Skyworks or long, snake-like free-flowing art in the sky.
Film Painting I (1977, 19 minutes, color, silent, 16mm)
The last film made by LeAnn Bartok is a series of compelling portraits of subjects, some blindfolded, including three women who resemble each other as well as the artist, bearded, in a homage to Marcel Duchamp; all shot through cracked glass with an iris effect enshrouding them, many painting a window frame with a flower. It is an extremely evocative meditation on duality and hints at what further works on film might have been possible from Bartok had she continued in the medium.
