Through February 24, the Walker Art Center presents the series Expanding the Frame, a six-week showcase of established and emerging directors who are breaking the boundaries of film and video.
Highlights of this year's series include the area premiere of St. Paul native Esther B. Robinson's A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (January 18, 7:30 pm; January 19, 2 and 7:30 pm; January 20, 2 pm), which won a Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival; Polish artist Piotr Uklański's Summer Love (January 12 and 26, 7:30 pm; January 13 and 27, 2 pm), a take on the classic western which also becomes an allegory of his country's history during the demise of Communism; Jennifer Fox's six-part Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (January 31–February 2), a sexy, humorous, and personal yet universal investigation of modern womanhood; and four films by German artist Ulrike Ottinger (February 22–24), presented in collaboration with the University of Minnesota's Institute for Advanced Film Studies. Uklanski, Robinson, Fox, and Ottinger will be present to introduce their films.
Expanding the Frame, which look in depth at into the work of several filmmakers, opens with Uklański's Summer Love, touted as the first Polish western. He calls it "a copy of a copy," referring to the European spaghetti Western as much as to the original American archetype and addressing issues of cultural authenticity by exploiting cinema's most codified genre.
Beyond the buzz of Uklański's film, this second edition of Expanding the Frame reaches back as far as the mid-1960s, but most of the work is recent. Some films have a thematic overlap to the Walker exhibitions Brave New Worlds, which spotlights socially and politically focused art from around the world, and Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes (opening February 16), which reflects on art and architecture from and about American suburbia. Some filmmakers with previous connections to the Walker were selected to help audiences reconnect with their work. "This is probably the program that most adheres to the Walker's mission," says film/video curator Sheryl Mousley. "It's global, it's about experimentation, and it's about working with artists over their careers."
Jennifer Fox is emblematic of Expanding the Frame's mission—exposing experimental, boundary-breaking filmmakers. She earned acclaim and credibility for her breakout debut, the 1987 documentary Beirut, the Last Home Movie. The Walker screened her An American Love Story eight years ago. She rejects the sound-bite approach to documentaries, and instead spends years investing in the lives of her subjects. When she set out to document her ideas of sexuality, attempts at motherhood, and transition into middle age, she didn't initially foresee a journey taking her to 17 countries and unfolding, ultimately, as six hours of film. While visiting and interviewing women about their own sense of womanhood, she turned the narrative form on its head with a filmmaking technique called "passing the camera"—she handed it to her interviewees and had them point the lens back at her.
Expanding the Frame also goes deep into the thematic works of European filmmakers Cristian Nemescu, Cristian Mungiu, Heinz Emigholz, and Ulrike Ottinger. Nemescu and Mungiu, with one short and two features in the series, embody the artistic liberation of the post-Ceauşescu generation in Romania. Emigholz's films, documenting design and architecture, complement the Walker's Worlds Away exhibition. The four Ottinger films in the series, presented in collaboration with the University of Minnesota's Institute for Advanced Film Studies, trace the filmmaker's globe-trotting fiction and documentary work.
Another series highlight is A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory. The filmmaker, Esther B. Robinson, documents the complicated personal and professional relationship between Andy Warhol and her uncle, Williams, and explores the possibility that their entanglement played into Williams' unsolved disappearance. -- www.walkerart.org
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