Bio

Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her work has screened widely across North America and Europe including at MoMA, NY., Centre George Pompidou, Albright-Knox Gallery, and n.ow.here, in the UK. Her work is also featured in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. Sternberg taught at York University, wrote the column "On (Experimental) Film" for Cinema Canada, was an organizer of the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and is a founding member of Pleasure Dome Artists’ Film Exhibition Group and AfFA (Artists for Film Art). She has been the visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities as well as the Université d’Avignon and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She works in other media, including video, performance and installation. Sternberg was a recipient of the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2011. 

For more information, see www.fringeonline.ca. or her website: www.barbarasternberg.com

Works

Opus 40

  • 1979
  • Barbara Sternberg

Opus 40 is about repetition: repetition in working and living, repetition through multiplicity and series, repetition to form pattern and rhythm, repetition in order and in revealing. “Opus 40” was filmed in the Enterprise Foundry, Sackville, New Brunswick, and has excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s writings.

Opus 40

Colour Theory

  • 2014
  • Barbara Sternberg

Goethe’s colour theory dealt with the optics of colour relations while Rudolf Steiner’s and Kandinsky’s theories attribute emotional, musical, and spiritual affects to colour. North American Natives see personality traits, states of mind, seasons, races and the four directions in the four colours: red, yellow, white, black.

Colour Theory

Far From

  • 2014
  • Barbara Sternberg

Constructed with repetitions and variations in reference to the musical form of a nocturne, Far From is an accumulation of the layers, density and noise of existence. The film evokes the ghosts of lives lived and the traces of lives being lived, rising.

Far From

Love Me

  • 2014
  • Barbara Sternberg

Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating: emotions conflict, confuse and are difficult to reconcile. The texts ‘speak’ unsaid and unsayable thoughts, impolitic or just impolite. They are suppressed exclamations from past injustices and hurts; angers surface which are interrupting, erupting and demanding of attention.

Love Me