MARKET: Carolee Schneemann (RIP) 2012 Documentary

“I think documenting the life has to do with writing the weather in some ways. Everything seems very marvelous and kind of spectacular in its banality. That elusive, evanescent little web of what we can say to each other.” —Carolee Schneemann

The legendary artist and iconoclast Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) passed away on March 6, 2019. Around the time of her belated, much-deserved retrospective at MoMA PS1 in 2017, The Metrograph screened filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawsaka’s marvelous portrait of Schneemann. By turns elliptical, poetic, and visceral, the wildly inventive Breaking the Frame eschews tepid paint-by-numbers biography, offering instead that rare artist doc that finds an innovative form worthy of its groundbreaking subject.

Breaking The Frame is a feature–length documentary portrait of the New York artist Carolee Schneemann by Canadian filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawska. A pioneer of performance and body art as well as avant-garde cinema, Schneemann has been breaking the frames of the art world for five decades, challenging assumptions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Shot over a period of 6 years and utilizing a rich variety of film and hi-definition formats, Breaking The Frame is a kinetic, hyper-cinematic intervention, a critical meditation on the relation of art to the physical and conceptual aspects of daily life and on the attributes of memory.