Light Industry at Princeton: A Study in Choreography for Camera

“The space of the field, the ritual temple and the theater stage have been, historically, a place within which dancers moved,” Maya Deren wrote in a 1960 program note on her films. “But cinema provides a different order of space, is able to create a different kind of time, can even cause the human body to perform inhuman movement. These choreographies for camera are not dances recorded by the camera, they are dances choreographed for and performed by the camera and human beings together.” Made with dancer Talley Beatty, A Study in Choreography for Camera presents a supreme distillation of Deren’s theory.

Although, as demonstrated in Sharon Lockhart’s debut feature Goshogaoka, there can also be a choreographic dimension to the fixed camera and the extended take… Here the emphasis lies not on the expressive potential of camera movement and editing, but rather on the relationship between a subject and its framing, both in time and space. As with Deren, this too is a dance which cannot exist but on film.

For ten years Light Industry has been one of the leading venues for alternative film and electronic art in New York. This fall Light Industry presents at Princeton a selection of highlights from their first decade. The series is curated by Thomas Beard, a founder and director of Light Industry, and organized by Devin Fore (German).