This short footage by JoAnn Elam shows two women digging a hole in the woods. As many elements in this collection reveal, Elam was interested in farm labor, especially as she spent some time in Monterey, MA in the early 1980s. Throughout her life, Elam was also an advocate for gender equality and her work
This footage resembles many other elements in this collection, where JoAnn Elam investigates the potentialities of the cinematic medium to capture and transform shapes, colors, textures, movements, and light. Here, Elam first films a few plants by the windows inside her house, out of focus, shadows against the light, and then the furniture and the
This footage follows two dogs and two cats around the house, with the camera sometimes zooming in on the animals’ eyes looking directly towards us and on their furry bodies and thus creating a sense of intimacy with them. Throughout these domestic scenes, possibly shot at JoAnn Elam’s home in Chicago, the cats and dogs
As its title indicates, JoAnn Elam’s Sprockets shows the sprocket holes of a film strip moving vertically and then horizontally across the screen. In light of Elam’s experimental work and especially in our digital age, this footage reads as a reflection on the physicality of the filmic medium, whose visual, hypnotic power here comes from
Shot from a flying airplane, this footage by JoAnn Elam first shows a series of landscapes near the ocean, clouds, and the geometrical grids of American suburban neighborhoods (location unknown). Near the end, Elam turns her attention to the airport employees working on the tarmac while the plane is stationary. This element ends on a
As in Filmabuse (ca. 1975), the film strip in JoAnn Elam’s Disabuse looks as if it were partially consumed by colorful flames, until the screen turns almost completely black, with a few specks of color here and there. Filmabuse ends with the image of a woman staring straight into the camera, yet Disabuse simply goes
In this footage, JoAnn Elam follows postal workers during the protest that their unions organized in Washington DC around 1978. Elam also films a parade with a marching band at night, which probably occurred then as well. This film appears to contain footage edited out (and vice versa) of ” [Postal Workers’ Washington DC Protest]
This footage includes a series of title cards with JoAnn Elam’s name on them, against a white or black background. At the end, a brief shot shows what could be an advertisement from a magazine, with a caption over a woman’s head that reads “Beware what you wear.” Elam may have collected this item because
B/W Mich, NY + Mass starts with black and white shots of nature taken in the woods, possibly in Michigan or Monterey, MA, which JoAnn Elam visited often in the early 1980s. As in other film works by Elam, the camera focuses on the canopy, on tree leaves casting their shadows on the ground, and
JoAnn Elam’s Elma + Deans opens with several shots of a church, perhaps near Elma, NY, where Elam spent some time with her family as a child. She then embarks on a road trip through the countryside, films the landscape from the car, stops at a small house, goes back on the road, and stops