Curated by Robin Roblee-Strauss Works in original 16mm format In person & online

Microscope is very pleased to present a rare screening of films by Dutch filmmaker Barbara Meter — a central figure of the experimental film scene in the Netherlands starting from the 1970s and co-founder of the influential avant-garde film venue “Electric Cinema” in Amsterdam — curated by Robin Roblee-Strauss. All the films in the 55-minute long program will be screened in their original format.

From the curator: “Home and Away features one biographical documentary and four short avant-garde films by filmmaker, Barbara Meter.

As one of the first women to study at the Netherlands Film Academy in the 1960s and co-founder of Amsterdam’s “Electric Cinema,” a bastion of avant-garde film and ideas in the 1970s, Barbara has been a pioneer in the production and promotion of experimental filmmaking in the Netherlands.

In a 1971 interview, Barbara describes her work as “pure films,” conveying “thoughts and feelings by pure movement, a pure image that may flicker or be blurred, and by intervening in the process of developing and printing the film.” Through her innovative use of optical printing methods, she seamlessly massages, and reworks found sounds and images: combining them with her personal archive. She remolds these documents into distinct, deeply personal sense worlds.

This program showcases a range of works made throughout Barbara’s artistic career which echo deep psychological themes tied to the destabilizing effects the Second World War wrought on her family life and personal sense of home. Her notion of “wanting to belong to something you can’t reach” is explored prismatically in this film program by showing a biographical documentary work which explore her family’s history during WWII alongside experimental films that represent the universal feelings of yearning to belong, the pain of separation, the distance felt in estrangement, and the joy of homecomings.

Throughout Barbara’s life she has continued to create work, program screenings, and teach and lecture on film. Her work has been shown at Rotterdam Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Tate Gallery London, Cinematheque San Francisco, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City among many other venues in Europe. Home and Away is the first solo exhibition that combines her experimental work alongside her documentaries and the second solo exhibition of her films in North America.”

Curator Roblee-Strauss will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening.

General Admission $9 Member Admission $7 Online tickets will become available on this page at 6:30pm ET on the day of the event. _ Barbara Meter (Netherlands, b. 1939) co-founded the Electric Cinema in the early 1970s in Amsterdam, in need of a critical response to the commercialization of film production and programming. Run by members of the Dutch Filmmakers’ Coop, and STOFF (the Studio for the Development of Film and Film Manifestations), the theater became the epicenter of Dutch independent and avant-garde filmmaking. At the Electric Cinema, Meter curated international avant-garde and expanded cinema programs. After that, she co-created POLKIN (Political Kinema) and made documentaries as part of activist and feminist movements. — Via Light Cone

Guest curator Robin Roblee-Strauss is a lebenskünstler — a life-artist! Born and raised in the woodlands of Western Massachusetts. he has always gravitated towards filmmaking as an approach to research that combines scholarly investigation with artistic expression. At Hampshire College he studied non-fiction & experimental film, psychology, and critical disability studies. Robin has assisted several experimental filmmakers including Abraham Ravett, Barbara Meter, Ansuya Blom, and Abigail Child. He worked at Anthill Sound Design in the Netherlands as a sound editor and most recently as a research assistant on an archival documentary series directed by Luke Meyer. Curation is a new facet of his practice motivated by his investment in the haptic qualities of sound and the moving image works as a way to communicate through the senses — articulating alternative ways of knowing.