Thursday, September 16, 6 p.m. | Danièle Wilmouth in person!
- Still from “Eleanore & the Timekeeper” (Danièle Wilmouth, 2010). Image courtesy the artist.
Best known for her striking performance films, award-winning Chicago filmmaker and SAIC faculty member Danièle Wilmouth’s first feature is an intimate portrait of the complex bond between her aging grandmother and developmentally disabled uncle in rural Pennsylvania. Companions for the last 64 years—in times both idyllic and difficult—Eleanore and Ronnie are forced to embark on new, separate lives in the face of Eleanore’s advancing age and waning health. Ronnie finds new freedom in a group home while Eleanore copes with loneliness and heartbreak in the modest farmhouse where Ronnie grew up. Throughout this seven-year chronicle, Wilmouth meditates on the modest gestures and daily rituals that have bound the two together, tying them to the rhythms of small-town America and larger cycles of death and rebirth. The result is a clear-eyed and moving meditation on everyday life, transience, and familial love. Danièle Wilmouth, 2010, USA, 16mm on DigiBeta video, 76 min (plus discussion).
DANIÈLE WILMOUTH (1968, Pittsburgh) creates hybrids of performance art, dance, installation and cinema, which exploit the shifting hierarchies between live and screen space. Her films have screened in festivals, museums, galleries, and on television worldwide, including at the Kunst Museum, Bonn, Germany; the National Gallery of Armenia; Television Canal+(a), Argentina; Kino Arsenal, Berlin, Germany; Tampere Short Film Festival, Finland; IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, Holland; Anthology Film Archives, New York; and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan. A retrospective of her work toured Russia in 2004. From 1990-96, Wilmouth lived in Japan, where she co-founded Hairless Film, an independent filmmaking collective. She also studied the Japanese contemporary dance form Butoh under Katsura Kan, and performed with his troupe The Saltimbanques. Wilmouth is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most recently the 2010-2011 EMPAC Dance Movies Commission from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is currently on faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College.
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