EWVA European Women's Video Art
Marie ANDRÉ
Key Works
x
Constant (1984)
10m
U-matic (High Band)
The sea, a man and a woman. She is sitting in a deck-chair, he is walking behind the tents. On the beach, there are children and people. A fragment of a couple's daily life. But Marie Andre subverts and transgresses our habits as spectators and this formal transgression is precisely where the intensity and emotional charge of the video come from. (heure-exquise.org)
x
Bruxelles, une ville en ete (1987)
10m
Betacam
The scene is Brussels, a summer afternoon, and the city seems suspended, silent, waiting. A young girl reads a letter from a friend who is away from the city on vacation. André then opens the narrative — fiction? document? — into a journal of the city in summer, which she presents as an urban landscape of open, empty spaces, from pastoral parks to corporate plazas. Brussels' architecture, and its residents engaged in the transactions of daily life, are the essential elements with which André establishes a mood, a sense of time and place. When we return to the young girl, glimpsed in the kitchen, her restlessness and ennui have been contextualized by André's subtle yet incisive description of time passing in the city on a summer day. (argosarts.org)
x
Repetitions (1984-1985)
45m
Betacam
Marie Andre engages in a subtle relationship with the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and the dancers of her group, Rosas. The video both betrays and enhances the space and time of dancing, the camera follows or breaks up the movements of the dancers, the frame reveals the strain and the fulfilment of their bodies. The montage freely recounts the birth of the group's last creation, 'Elena's Aria'. (heure-exquise.org)
x
Un Ange Passe (1985)
42m
Betacam
’Un ange passe’ is a vivid observation of the social and sexual economies of prostitution, an indelibly envisioned narrative set in the Veemarkt harbor quarter of Antwerp. Andre tells the story of the prostitute Anita, who displays herself in a "show window" on the square and engages in a self-deceptive love for her abusive pimp. The everyday intimacies of Anita’s world - dressing and undressing, servicing her clients, exchanging money - are vividly set against the masculine milieu of the dock workers and sailors. André’s unique visual stylization and framing devices position the woman’s body at the intersection of the harbor’s financial, social and sexual economies. The disjunctive narrative and sordid social context call to mind Godard and Fassbinder, but André speaks through her heroine with a distinctly female, and ultimately feminist, voice. (argosarts.org)
x
Compositie (1985)
10m
Betacam
André re-organizes time, rhythm and sound in her portrait of the new music composer/pianist Walter Hus, constructing a study of the process of composing. Playing on the title's double meaning — "composition" and "composite" — André isolates musical gestures and fragments time, recomposing Hus' evolving composition. In this vividly realized document, André establishes a formal analogy between the compositional process of Hus' music and her own methodology of image-making. (eai.org)
©2019 European Women's Video Art
