Personal filmmaking in the poetic tradition: intimate, disturbing, layered portraits of contemporary womanhood. Marjorie Sturm is a feminist with a movie camera, shooting the spaces between consciousness and the consumer world in formats from gritty Super-8 to crisp digital video. Her most powerful reflections, frequently accompanied by original music and her own poetic fragments, seek out the interstices of nature and culture: in the lyrical short at the end of the DVD, "The Relief," the artist takes in an anti-tourist landscape of need and imperfection only to revel in what is offered in those "sunlit straying visions." Sturm’s eye for detail (whether shiny surfaces in a supermarket or the dark interiors of homes and the psyche) is matched by a blunt narrative aesthetic that confronts psychological clichés and conjures new configurations of the psychic and the social. A self-declared "non-specialist" whose work includes all sorts of filmmaking along with caring for mentally ill homeless people, Sturm’s fresh vision is a welcome relief from the world of commercial film and video. Buy this one on DVD and play it for all the women in your life.

(Review by Amy Villarejo)

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