Beating

“Beating” – to get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts… “Beating” exists in the area of boundaries. I work with images as they can be registered between abstraction and representation, between blurred and defined, between the formless and the formed – in-between, in motion. I try to render images suggestively, bodily and to use vocalizations and words for texture as well as information. (BS) “Water, like fire, is a dimension of the carnival insisting on the stateless and the flux … a world in which hierarchies were collapsing, boundaries dissolving … a state of becoming, not of being.” – Robert Kroetsch “Beating” considers horror/ fascination, evil/good, dark/light, and the relation between these terms, the one the flip side of the other. “Beating” sees history through the personal, expressing the anger, pain and fear suppressed in the denial of oppressive situations. “Beating” looks at and listens to the parts of ourselves (myself) hidden in shadow. “‘Beating’ is impelled by an obsessive devotion to bodies sacred and profane, raised in the light of the everyday to something akin to wonder…these bodies shimmering in the light of a history too terrible to remember. Or to forget… With the eye of a fetishist she searches the body’s topograhy for clues of oppression. And finds it here.” – Kika Thorne, Pleasure Dome The film’s surface, scratched and mottled, negative and positive, black & white and colour bears witness to storms of emotion. The film is sectioned; 3 min. – 12 min. segments, internally cohesive in terms of content and treatment have been edited into a dramatic whole. From section to section, repetitions occur, connections are made – reminiscences, equivalences between different images – to achieve the feeling or recognition that everything is related, it is all there all the time. “This supremely lyrical ‘beating’ makes some brutal connections.” – Peter Goddard, Toronto Star “In this collage of images is played out the paradoxical intertwining of hate and love… Sternberg’s films affect through their rhythmic pulses, films that set in place many complex networks…” – Barbara Godard