Breaking the Frame

Breaking the Frame documents the life and work of Carolee Schneemann, an artist who as has transformed discourses on the body, sexuality and gender.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


Image gallery

  • Director-Producer-Screenwriter Marielle Nitoslawska
  • With Carolee Schneemann
  • Canada 2012
  • 100 mins
  • Sales Picture Palace Pictures

Breaking the Frame is the first feature-length documentary on Carolee Schneemann, an artist whose pioneering work has transformed discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. In cinema history, she is primarily known for Fuses, an honestly explicit film of lovemaking from a feminine viewpoint shot between 1964-67. For decades, Schneemann has similarly challenged taboos in other media, making paintings, performances, video, collage and installations in which personal experiences are absolutely entwined with formal considerations: ‘Form is emotion. I work towards metaphors of sensation, a dramatisation of loss and recovery.’ Her kinetic performance style, developed while a key member of the Judson Dance Theater, produced pieces such as Meat Joy, Up To And Including Her Limits and Interior Scroll, now regarded as seminal works of live art. In this mesmerising film, which forgoes chronological biography, the artist generously shares her memories and extraordinary personal archive.
Mark Webber

Director statement

I first saw Schneemann’s legendary film Fuses by chance in my early twenties. I understood her depth decades later, while researching Bad Girl, a survey film on women and sexuality. I began dreaming up a sequel of sorts, with a focus on Schneemann. It was meant to be. Soon after, as she was looking for a studio space in Montreal, we met, got along right away, and discussed a possible film. I then drove down to NY to further explore the idea. On arriving in Springtown, I knew right away that I would be making this film. Her astounding house, garden and pond – all were innately cinematographic in the setting sun and rising magic hour. I began digging into Schneemann’s well of archives to soon realise that it perhaps has no bottom. And so Breaking the Frame began. I’ve always felt that the greatest asset of independent filmmaking is time. Time to get to know and feel the subject. Time to digest layers of meaning. Time to compose the film’s form, which reflects the absorbed entirety. This process can last years; a way of working that isn’t practical but yields irreplaceable authenticity. You observe and collect and wonder how to evoke the ‘past’ in the flow of cinema’s ever-virtual ‘present’. You displace space and fragment time. You listen. You follow the mind’s eye.
Marielle Nitoslawska

Director biography

A Montreal-based director and cinematographer, and former Chair of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, she was initiated to filmmaking at the National Film Board of Canada, then graduated as one of the few female cinematography students from the Polish National Film School in Lodz, and spent a decade in Poland, working as a filmmaker and activist during the 1980s. Her three previous films, Choices, Sky Bones and Bad Girl (a documentary about the evolution of female involvement in porn, featuring Marilyn Chambers) have received critical acclaim and extensive festival exhibition; the latter film has become a landmark documentary investigating explicit representations of female sexuality. Her work is defined by an experimental approach to structure and explorations into narrative and representation.

Filmography

1978 Memory
1979 His Day, Her Night; Déjeuner sur l'herbe
1984 Number 8
1985 Cinemuseum
1986 Zonas de Chiapas
1987 Options (Choices)
1998 Sky Bones
2001 Bad Girl [doc]
2012 Breaking the Frame [doc]