The HERETICS

THE HERETICS, 91 min, NTSC 4:3, 2009

Synopsis: THE HERETICS uncovers the inside story of the Second Wave of the Womem's Movement for the first time in a feature film or video. Joan Braderman, director and narrator, follows her dream of becoming a filmmaker to New York City in 1971. By chance, she joins a feminist art collective at the epicenter of the 1970's art world in lower Manhattan. In her first person account, THE HERETICS charts the history of a feminist collective from the inside out. That group, the Heresies Collective, published: "HERESIES; A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics" from 1977-1992. Unlike more traditional "documentaries," the film is framed with striking new digital motion graphics that extend the aesthetics of the magazine into the digital realm and onto the screen. THE HERETICS focuses on The Heresies Collective as a microcosm of the larger international women's movement, in which thousands of small, private groups of women met together in forms unique to their own settings, to consider their situation -- as women in a man's world -- and to devise strategies for unlocking the potential in women's lives. The hundreds of collective members, now scattered around the globe are accomplished artists, writers, architects, painters, filmmakers, designers, editors, curators, and teachers. Twenty-four of these women, speak intimately with the filmmaker about the extraordinary times they shared, challenging the terms of gender and power and re-imagining the lives of generations to come. Designing expressive ways to layer images, we work with: text, animation, archival stills and footage, the magazine itself, completed artworks and art as it is being made on sites world-wide. We collage all these elements in a language that evokes the collective experience and the aesthetics of the magazine. The original soundtrack for THE HERETICS mirrors the "radical collage" aesthetic, mixing acoustic rock guitar, scat-singing, jazz piano and violin, made mainly by women.

VIDEO BITES:
FRAMED

VIDEO BITES: FRAMED, 7min, NTSC 4:3, 1998

Synopsis: Video Bites

JOAN DOES DYNASTY

JOAN DOES DYNASTY, 35 min, NTSC 4:3, 1986

In the now classic, JOAN DOES DYNASTY, Braderman created the "post-scratch" chroma-key switcher effects she has made famous, the artist inserts her body into the world of the prime time soap opera, "Dynasty," where she does her now classic performance about the ways TV spectatorship simultaneously owns and disgusts its audience. Embodying the love//hate relationships so many of us experience with the characters and values of TV, Braderman "performs" feminist and reception theory, turning the reigning ideas of her period into video vernacular. She skewers 80's obsessions with money and power and its sexual anxieties in a piece - both hilarious and terrifying.

“Few have matched the bravery and wit of JOAN DOES DYNASTY” --Bob Reilly, SF MOMA

Selected Awards and Screenings:

• Edinburgh Film Festival, Scotland, 1997
• American Film Institute, National Video Festival, Los Angeles
• The Museum of Modern Art, NYC
• Museum of Fine Art, Philadelphia
• Cinemama Festival, Montreal
• Boston Film/Video Foundation
• Australian Video Festival
• Cinematrix, Festival of Films by Women Directors
• Oviedo y Ayunta de Sevilla, Spain
• The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
• Hallwalls, Rochester, NY
• New American Makers, San Francisco
• Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid
• Institute of Contemporary Art, London

30 SECOND SPOT
RECONSIDERED

30 SECOND SPOT RECONSIDERED, 11 min, NTSC 4:3, 1989

Made at the time of the '88 presidential election, 30 SECOND SPOT RECONSIDERED is a true story told by the artist about censorship and corporate style. It is based on a true story about the adventures of the artist buying network time for a TV spot, --an ad for counter-bicentennial activities in l976, confronting the system of invisible, corporate censorship which runs broadcast television.“ --Boston Globe

It was a Grand Prize Winner in Video Zone's 1989 Festival, was seen at the 'SHOW THE RIGHT THING' Conference in NYC, won Boston "Critic's Choice Award" in the 1990 New England Film and Video Festival, and took Second Prize in the Daniel Wadsworth National Video Festival. It is often used in the current effort to protect freedom of speech from the self-appointed congressional censors, now making noise.

Selected Awards and Screenings:

• Critic’s Choice Award, New England Film and Video Festival, Boston, 1990
• Grand Prize, Video Zone, 1989. Zone Art Center, Springfield
• Second Prize, Daniel Wadsworth National Video Festival, 1990
• Berlin Film Festival
• Australian Film Festival, Berkeley
• New American Makers, San Francisco
• THE SHOW RIGHT THING Conference, NYU
• Majestic Theater, Boston
• Real Artways, Hartford and New Haven
• Median Operativ, Berlin, Germany
• Utica College, Bennington College, Colgate University, S.U.N.Y, Purchase
• University of California, Irvine, and San Diego, University of Glasgow, Scotland
• The Anti-Censorship Show
• London Art Institute, Media School, London College of Printing and Distributive Trades

JOAN SEES STARS

JOAN SEES STARS 60 min, NTSC 4:3, 1993

“Videomaker Braderman uses her own body as the site for exploring the ways our own culture of appearances meets the politics of identity... She looks at life through rose colored glasses, then whips them off and dishes the dirt: movies meet life, life meets death and romance meets Perdue chicken in this meditation on our illicit VCR pleasures. Watch and eat your heart out.”--B. Ruby Rich

“A masterpiece.”--Joel Kovel, author of The Age of Desire, History and Spirit et al.

“Smart, low-budget bridge between theory and pop culture, funny and devastating at the same time." --Philadelphia City Paper

Selected Awards and Screenings:

• Premiere: "Video Visions," New York Film Festival, Oct. 15,1993 at Lincoln Center
• European Premiere: National British Film Theater, London, and Dec. 1993
• Black Maria Film/Video Festival, Juror's Citation Award
• Independent Mass Media Festival
• Women in the Director's Chair Festival, Chicago
• Zone Art Center University of Glasgow, Scotland
• Chicago Filmmakers, "Bodies in Crisis, "Oct. 1993
• Videogame, New York Foundation for the Arts, Spring 2000
• Institute of Contemporary Art - Boston, Jan. 1994
• San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film/Video Festival
• International House, "Our Dinner with Joan," Philadelphia
• Cicada de Vigo International Festival de Video, Vigo, Spain
• Atlanta Film/Video Festival Award, Best "Dramatic Criticism"
• The Space Gallery, Boston
• The American Center, Paris
• Moscow Television

NO MORE NICE GIRLS

NO MORE NICE GIRLS 44 min, NTSC 4:3, 1989

No More Nice Girls combines fiction and collage. About what it's like to see your political destiny erased from "popular memory" and dumped in revisionist history's garbage pile. It's about having once felt magically "in synch" with the times; about the friends you made then, and how they sustain you through these times.

" … Brilliantly written and realized” --Carrie Mae Weems

Selected Awards and Screenings:

• Premiere: Collective for Living Cinema, April 1989
• Winner, First Prize, Daniel Wadsworth National Video Festival, 1990
• THE DECADE SHOW, Studio Museum of Harlem
• WOW Festival, NYC
• San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
• British Film Institute, London
• New American Makers, New Works Series, San Francisco
• The Chicago Art Institute
• Hallwalls, Rochester, NY
• San Francisco Art Institute
• The Brooklyn Museum
• University of Wisconsin
• Radcliffe Bunting Institute
• Bennington College
• Boston Film/Video Foundation
• DCTV, NYC
• S.U.N.Y. Purchase; Astoria Museum of Motion Picture
• Australian Film Festival
• "HOW DO I LOOK? Conference," New York University
• Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
• I.U.C, Conference on Women, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia
• 2-Day Workshop w/ Joan Braderman and Zeinabu Davis - Media Working Group, KY
• "New Works," National Video Festival, American Film Institute, Los Angeles

TELL THEM FOR US: MADRE IN NICARAGUA

TELL THEM FOR US: MADRE IN NICARAGUA 28 min, NTSC 4:3, 1985

Co-produced and edited with Jane Lurie for Madre Video Project. News cinematographer for CBS, Jane Lurie, traveled with a diverse group of women all over the country, visiting schools, hospitals, women’s organizations, and finally, the North where the fighting was going on between The Contras (trained and supported by the US) and protectors of the newly elected Sandinista government. The group sponsored by MADRE was presenting a new ambulance to the Berta Calderon Women’s Hospital. They met hundreds of women, young and old, who were energized by the possibilities of the new democratic Nicaragua which Jane captured with beautiful close-ups and shots of the country-side as the North American women met and compared stories and ideas with their sisters in this young, new state. The piece is accompanied by an original score by the grandchildren of one of Nicaragua’s many famous and accomplished poets in their duo, Guardabaranco.

Selected Awards and Screenings:

• Winner, l985 MADRE Achievement Award
• Shown at schools, churches, the U.S. House of Representatives
• Club Senzala
• Port Washington Public Library
• University of Massachusetts, Union Video
• Donnell Library, New York
• Syracuse University S.U.N.Y., Purchase, NY
• Colgate University
• School of Visual Arts
• Shown in The Deep Dish International Satellite Show

WAITING FOR THE INVASION

WAITING FOR THE INVASION, U.S. CITIZENS IN NICARAGUA 28 min, NTSC 4:3, 1984

WAITING FOR THE INVASION, U.S. CITIZENS IN NICARAGUA by Joan Braderman, Dee Dee Halleck, Skip Blumberg et al was made to oppose the Reagan-sponsored support for the counter revolutionaries in that country on Public TV. It won the Global Village Best Documentary Award in 1984. Confronted with the problem of PBS’s simplistic notion of objectivity (e.g. one side of argument + another side = truth) the group followed the lives of North Americans working with the Sandinistas in fields like agricultural development, economics, and the creation of a new fairer prison system so that they could keep subtitles to a minimum for the sake of American viewers. At the same time they found others such as the local head of Coca Cola and the American ambassador who attempted to defend American intervention in Nicaraguan politics. This strategy worked; the show was picked up by a number of PBS stations around the country who wished to show a perspective unlike that of the rest of the US mass media on the popularity of the Sandinistas. At the time the crew was shooting, many were digging trenches in their backyards to protect them from a possible invasion by the US like the one that just occurred to break the revolution in Grenada. As they worked one could here “no pasaran” chanted throughout Managua.

Selected Awards and Screenings:

• Winner-Best Documentary Award, Global Village Documentary Festival, NYC, l984
• Shown nationally on "PRESENTE"- WCET, Los Angeles, PBS
• Van Dam Theater, NYC
• Wexner Center for the Arts
• The Whitney Museum
• The Museum of Modern Art, NYC
• Donnell Public Library
• Cuban International Film Festival
• University of California at San Diego; Bard College

NATALIE DIDN'T DROWN

NATALIE DIDN'T DROWN 28 min, NTSC 4:3, 1983

“The artists' first venture into video performance is a manic enactment of the relationship of readers with tabloids. Championing gossip as "history according to women and more likely to be "true" than the New York Times," she takes us on a schizophrenic personal narrative tour of the world according to the Enquirer.” Martha Gever. Slandering the publisher on screen in true tabloid form, Braderman and De Landa create a style of scratch video, using sometimes vibrating, luridly framed video switcher "wipes" which both satirize and describe tabloid journalism's own glitzy style. An unreconstructed lover of tabloid fantasy, Braderman's face and body fly through the headlines and photos she loves in this brilliant and disturbing satire about popular culture and its ubiquitous place in our lives.” --Elizabeth Hess, “Village Voice“

Selected Awards and Screenings:

• Premiere: Paper Tiger Television
• The W. P. A. Gallery, Washington
• University of Toronto
• University California
• The Walker Art Center
• Whitney Museum of Art
• California Art Institute
• Manhattan Cable TV, New York City
• Premiere: Paper Tiger Television
• The W. P. A. Gallery, Washington
• University of Toronto University California
• The Walker Art Center
• Whitney Museum of Art
• California Art Institute
• Manhattan Cable TV, New York City
• University of Massachusetts
• The Institute of Contemporary Art, London
• Chicago Art Institute
• Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California
• The Kitchen, NYC
• CHANNEL 4: London
• The “Made for TV“ Festival
• American Film Institute, LA