Marjorie Keller (1950–1994) was an experimental filmmaker, author, activist, film scholar.
J. Hoberman
James Lewis Hoberman (born March 14, 1949) is an American film critic, journalist, author and academic. He began working at ''The Village Voice'' in the 1970s, became a full-time staff writer in 1983, and was the newspaper's senior film critic ...
called her "an unselfish champion of the avant-garde."
Early life and education
Keller was born in 1950 in
Yorktown, New York
Yorktown is a town on the northern border of Westchester County, New York, United States. A suburb of the New York City metropolitan area, it is approximately north of midtown Manhattan. The population was 36,569 at the 2020 U.S. Census.
Histo ...
. The youngest of seven children, Keller grew up in a large, upper-middle-class, Protestant family. As a girl, Keller's mother schooled her in the feminine arts of cooking, gardening and entertaining.
Keller never gave up these skills (she even used them as inspiration for her films), even though other feminists of her time frowned upon such domestic jobs.
B. Ruby Rich
B. Ruby Rich is an American scholar; critic of independent, Latin American, documentary, feminist, and queer films; and a professor emerita of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz. Among her many contributions, she is ...
(a friend, former lover of Keller's and another important member of the feminist film movement), fondly remembers a Passover dinner that Keller made in this passage from her memoir:
"And the food was great, because Margie was already a fabulous cook: for a rebel girl of that era, she was remarkably versed in the female arts."
Keller first attended
Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...
, but finished her coursework at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago after getting expelled from Tufts for participating in a protest in 1972. She then went on to pursue her master's degree and then her doctorate in Cinema Studies at New York University in 1975. During her years at Tufts and the Art Institute of Chicago, Keller was instructed by American avant-garde filmmaker
Stan Brakhage
James Stanley Brakhage ( ; January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.
Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a larg ...
and colleague of Saul Levine, Ruby Rich and Diego Cortez .
Politics
Marjorie Keller was deeply entrenched in the politics of her generation. She was arrested for participating in a protest at the White House against Nixon's price control policies, and she actively demonstrated at the Republican National Convention in 1972. Keller openly supported the issues of welfare reform, labor union rights, and AIDS awareness throughout her life. Although politically active, she only made one expressly political film, ''Hell No: No Cuts!'', which dealt with racism and the welfare system.
Feminism in relation to Keller and her films
At the time Keller was making her films, the
feminist movement
The feminist movement (also known as the women's movement, or feminism) refers to a series of social movements and political campaigns for radical and liberal reforms on women's issues created by the inequality between men and women. Such ...
of the 1960s and 70's was in full swing. As a result of this movement, feminist film theory was applied to a majority of films made by women in that era. Keller openly rejected the structural rules and regulations based on feminist film theory. In a review of E. Ann Kaplan's 1983 book ''Women and Film'' Keller stated that theory "obfuscates women's film making in the name of feminism." Keller refused to work within the confines set up by film theorists, many of whom have never made a film themselves. Because of this ideology, Marjorie Keller's work was shunned by the critical feminist world.
Filmography
Marjorie Keller's work exists in the experimental realm of the lyrical and the "diary" film styles pioneered by
Stan Brakhage
James Stanley Brakhage ( ; January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.
Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a larg ...
,
Gregory Markopoulos, and
Marie Menken
Marie Menken (born Marie Menkevicius; May 25, 1909 – December 29, 1970) was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and socialite. She was noted for her unique filming style that incorporated collage. She was one of the first New York fil ...
(all of whom are cited as being big influences. In her films, Keller used themes and images from her own life and experiences. She explored what it was like to be a feminist in the latter half of the twentieth century, in her own way. Children were also an inspiration to her. This can be seen in both her films and her writings.
Marjorie Keller made over twenty-five films in her brief lifetime.
''Hell No: No Cuts!'', ca. 1972 (25 min.): silent, black and white; 8 mm
''Backsection'', ca. 1972 (4.5 min.): silent, black and white; 8 mm
''History of Art 3939'', ca. 1972 (2.5 min.): silent, color; 8 mm
''Part IV: Green Hill'', ca. 1972 (3 min.): sound, color; 8 mm
''Turtle'', ca. 1972 (2.5 min.): silent, color; 8 mm
''Untitled'', ca. 1972 (7.5 min.): silent, black and white; 8 mm
''Pieces of Eight'', 1973 (3 min.): silent, black and white; 8 mm
''Duck Fuck/Rube in Galena'', 1973 (4 min.): silent, color; 16 mm
''Swept'', 1973 (3 min.): silent, color; 16 mm
''The Outer Circle'', 1973 (6.75 min.): sound, color; 16 mm
''She/Va'', 1973 (3 min.): silent, color; 16 mm
''Objection'', 1974 (18.25 min.): sound, color; 16 mm
''Film Notebook: Part 1'', 1975 (12.25 min.): silent, color; 8 mm
''Superimposition (1)'', 1975 (14.75 min.): silent, color; 16 mm
''By Two's & Three's: Women'', 1976 (7 min.): silent, color; 8 mm
''Film Notebook: 1969-76; Part 2, Some of Us in the Mechanical Age'', 1977 (27 min.): silent, color; 8 mm
''Misconception'', 1977 (43 min.): sound, color; 16 mm
''The Web'', 1977 (10 min.): silent, color; 8 mm
''On the Verge of an Image of Christmas'', 1978 (10.5 min.): silent, color; 8 mm
''Ancient Parts/Foreign Parts'', 1979 (6 min.): silent, color; 16 mm
''Six Windows'', 1979 (7 min.): sound, color; 16 mm
''Daughters of Chaos'', 1980 (20 min.): sound, color; 16 mm
''The Fallen World'', 1983 (9.5 min.): sound, black and white, color; 16 mm
''Lyrics'', 1983 (9 min.): sound, color; Super 8
''The Answering Furrow'', 1985 (27 min.): sound, color; 16 mm
''Private Parts'', 1988 (12.75 min.): silent, color; 16 mm
''Herein'', 1991 (35 min.): sound, color; 16 mm
Writings
Keller's dissertation, ''The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell and Brakhage'' was published in 1986. She also published a children's pop-up book that she wrote and illustrated herself titled ''The Moon on the Porch''. At the time of her death, she was working on a book about women experimental filmmakers, which was never completed.
Other work
In addition to being a filmmaker, author, activist, and scholar, Keller also served on the board of directors of the Collective for Living Cinema and was the founding editor of their journal, ''Motion Picture'' from 1984 to 1987. She was also the head of
The Film-Makers' Cooperative
The Film-Makers' Cooperative a.k.a. legal name The New American Cinema Group, Inc. is an artist-run, non-profit organization incorporated in July 1961 in New York City by Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopo ...
in New York for a period of time in the late 1980s, and was a professor of film making and film history at the
University of Rhode Island
The University of Rhode Island (URI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Kingston, Rhode Island, United States. It is the flagship public research as well as the land-grant university of the state of Rhode Isla ...
.
[Blaetz, Robin. "Amnesis Time: The Films of Marjorie Keller." Women's Experimental Cinema : Critical Frameworks. By Robin Blaetz. New York: Duke UP, 2007. 215.]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Keller, Marjorie
American women experimental filmmakers
1950 births
1994 deaths
University of Rhode Island faculty
Tufts University alumni
School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
New York University alumni