Press and Conversations
- 2024 Cahiers du cinéma Ostrovsky, folioscopes
Les mots de Clarice Lispector, dont l’interview rappelle les meilleurs moments télévisuels de Marguerite Duras, rencontrent les plages brésiliennes filmées par Ostrovsky, « hiatus » urbains dont le ciel nocturne offre un écran aux incrustations de poésie concrète, mi-chemin visuel entre le cinéma et la littérature
Download full article as PDF - 2024 How to Enjoy Experimental Film H2EEF Here and There and Wherever She Is with Vivian Ostrovsky
Vivian Ostrovsky is a truly international filmmaker (as well as curator). Born in New York to a Belarusian father and Ukrainian mother, Vivian has been somewhat nomadic all of her life, regularly finding herself in Rio, Paris, New York and Tel Aviv. “Home”, she writes “is wherever I feel at home – and that might be in a hotel or on a plane or on my way to an unknown destination with a camera and recorder in my bag”. Her works freely combine footage she has shot herself with an array of found footage, featuring both heartfelt affection and laugh-out-loud humour. Starting as an exclusively Super-8 based filmmaker, she now favours her mobile phone as the primary instrument for her work. Here we discuss her filmmaking practice ranging from her first experiments to her current work-in-progress (a film about the poet Elizabeth Bishop) as well as some of Vivian’s own favourite films.
30 May 2024 · 32 minutes
Podcast
- 2022 SON CHANT Aspect – Journal of Film & Screen Media
Starting off, what inspired you to make this film?
I met Chantal in the 1970s and we remained friends ever since, meeting in Paris, New York, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and our paths crossed various times. I loved her work and I very much appreciated her as a filmmaker, as a friend, and I appreciated her sense of humor. We had common things in our background also, our culture, this middle European background, the stories that we had heard of during our childhood, World War II, our parents generation.
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By Ben van Welzen - 2022 THE TITLE WAS SHOT Catalogue des 25èmes Rencontres Internationales Traverse
The Title was shot a beau être court, il a glissé du comique à d’autres émotions, fidèle à cette nécessité du cinéma prônée par Vertov : capter voire saturer la réceptivité du spectateur. Et ce en intégrant le cinéma dans la cinéma. Et ce en l’entraînant à penser dans cette confiance au cinéma et non par le concept.
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Simone Dompeyre - 2022 SON CHANT Premiere en Argentina BAFICI Catalogo
Dos milagros para desordenar el océano. Para desdibujar fronteras y alterar el sueño. El arte puede salvarnos. La música puede salvarnos. El amor puede salvarnos. Pero no del todo.
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Laura A. López - 2021 Arte!Brasileiros VIVIAN OSTROVSKY’S EXPERIMENTAL DIVE
Using found footage and her own home movies, Ostrovsky ended up creating her own language, which filmmaker and critic Yann Beauvais dubbed “journal-mosaic”. A combination of two genres of experimental cinema, film collage and film journal.
Miguel Groisman
Download full article as PDF - 2021 SON CHANT L'art c'est faire - Traverse video catalogue
Son Chant exprime combien ils étaient liés à la musique, au son voire à la danse. Ce film de Vivian entrelace diverses scènes ou ébauches de scènes, fulgurances emblématiques de cette écriture singulière.
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Simone Dompeyre - 2021 SOROCINÉ Rencontre avec Vivian Ostrovsky
- 2021 RFI BRASIL Convida Vivian Ostrovsky
Cineasta americana que cresceu no Brasil promove filmes experimentais de mulheres em Paris
Download full article as PDF - 2021 SON CHANT OBERHAUSEN Fest desistfilm
As a film essay, Ostrovsky elaborates her montage from motifs, such as scenes where characters prevail in passageways, through marked and dry steps, dance scenes under fashionable rhythms, or where Chantal evokes the sensations that the interpretations aroused in her of Sonia, and, from this, the position of the music in her works: In a film of words, the cello becomes another voice, Chantal is heard saying.
Download full article as PDF - 2021 Artechock Solidarität als Störung
Vivian Ostrovsky ist eine in Paris lebende Experimentalfilmemacherin und Wegbegleiterin von Chantal Ackerman und Sonia Wieder-Atherton. Son Chant ist ein flüchtiges Doppelportrait der Filmemacherin und der Cellistin, die über die Videoaktivistin Delphine Seyrig zusammengefunden hatten. Die rauchige Stimme von Ackerman, das Cellospiel von Wieder-Atherton, dazu viele Filmausschnitte erstellen eine kaleidoskopartige Filmphilosophie.
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Dunja Bialas
- 2021 Espace art actuel FIFA expérimental
Aucun de ces genres ne sort indemne du traitement que lui consacre Ostrovsky: déconstruction des codes, puis recomposition de prime abord chaotique mais en vérité méticuleusement tissée.
Itay Sapir
Download full article as PDF - 2021 ENTREVUE : Vivian Ostrovsky avec Nicole Gingras | FIFA
- 2020 Le Son d’un regard : rencontre avec Vivian Ostrovsky Centre Simone de Beauvoir & Wom@rts
- 2020 UNSOUND Traverse video catalogue
Unsound en écriture filmique d’association, de coalition déborde la boutade, tout en propageant cet esprit joyeux, il déborde le premier abord de reconnaissance du pouvoir sonore, entendu jusque dans son absence parce que construit dans nos successives séances de cinéma ; il entraîne bien au-delà, là où le son est image à agir. Là où le son dépasse le champ référentiel et s’envisage dans des configurations formelles à inventer, hors du cadre prévu.
Simone Dompeyre
Download full article as PDF - 2020 Noticias de Gipuzkoa El Zinemaldia del pasado mira al futuro
Como explica La Parra, se trata de un episodio « muy desconocido » en la historia del Festival, en el que se dio cita « lo mejor de la creación cinematográfica hecha por mujeres ». ¿Quiénes acudieron? Una lista « impresionante », en la que figuraban los nombres de Agnès Varda, Cecilia Bartolomé, Vivian Ostrovsky, Larisa Shepitko, Nelly Kaplan, Paula Delsol, Julia Mellinger, Marta Meszaros o Vera Chytilova.
Download full article as PDF - 2020 GME News Women’s History Month: GME Features Moving Image Works by Women Filmmakers
PLUNGE is a double-DVD edition spanning Vivian Ostrovksy’s experimental filmmaking career. Conversant in the experimental filmmaking practices of such artists as Jonas Mekas (DIARIES, NOTES, AND SKETCHES) and Jim McBride (DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY, 1967), Ostrovsky was inspired to create her own film diaries. She developed a filmmaking technique that initially involved shooting with a silent Super 8 camera; she loved the “gritty…indefinition” of the images that were exposed on the film’s emulsion. She continued with an intuitive editing process, adding in sound originating from vinyl records. (Later, she filmed in MiniDV so as to simultaneously be able to record image and sound together).
Download full article as PDF - 2019 Film Comment Vivian Ostrovsky : Plunge
A compelling presentation of Vivian Ostrovsky’s prolific career in experimental moving image, the aptly titles Plunge dives deep into the artist-curator’s singularly playful mode of collage filmmaking.
Download full article as PDF - 2019 Weimarer Poetry film preis Weimar Poetry Film Award
Hiatus combines different audiovisual languages to create poetic as well as documentary collage, whose many levels provoke different interpretations. This hybrid video reveals part of the life of Clarice Lispector, a woman who lived and wrote against her own time, and gives her uncomfortable voice a new topicality. At the same time, the video poem connects us with the origins of experimental poetry and above all video poetry in Brazil.
Download full article as PDF - 2019 Chaosreign.fr Du chaos à voir chez Re:Voir
Un généreux assortiment des films de Vivian Ostrovsky qui témoigne de la diversité de ses œuvres. Certaines d’entre elles possèdent un aspect journal filmique, sans que ce soit nécessairement le cas, son montage se veut comique, succinct, décousu.
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Geoffroy Dedenis - 2019 Libération Les coupés décollés de Vivian Ostrovsky
On parle ici plutôt de courts films-mosaïques réalisés dès les années 80, où elle franchit les frontières (géographiques et filmiques) aisément, de Paris à New York, en passant par Amsterdam, Jérusalem et Rio…
Jérémy Piette
Download full article as PDF - 2019 Frieze magazine Vivian Ostrovsky’s Playful Politics
Plunge contains about half of Ostrovsky’s output: 16 films made between 1982 and 2014. Most of these combine archival material – often from the Israel Film Archive, with which her father was involved – with Ostrovsky’s own Super-8 footage…
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JULIET JACQUES - 2019 Les Lettres françaises Survivance du colportage
La constitution de ce DVD participe par ailleurs pleinement au cheminement de Vivian Ostrovsky, dont la contribution au cinéma expérimental avait débuté dans les années 1970 par la distribution de films réalisés par des femmes ou sur des femmes, qu’elle se chargeait elle-même d’apporter dans les différents festivals où ils furent programmés.
Download full article as PDF - 2018 Screendaily "She didn't play by the rules": Jerusalem retrospective looks at Chantal Akerman's career
Ostrovsky first met Akerman when she invited her 1974 feature Je Tu Il Elle to a women’s film festival she organised under the auspices of the Ciné-Femmes International banner in the mid-1970s in Paris. Akerman directed and starred in the picture as a solitary young woman who embarks on a series of intimate encounters, first with a truck driver, played by a young Niels Arestrup in one of his first big-screen roles, and then an ex-girlfriend. It was regarded as a daring exploration of female sexuality when it hit the festival circuit in the 1970s.
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MELANIE GOODFELLOW - 2018 DizzyMess Traverse Vidéo catalogue
…Cependant pour que film soit, le désordre doit s’organiser et le vertige de l’enfant du film de Truffaut répond à l’apesanteur d’un cosmonaute ; la tombée des arbres précède celle des dictateurs, l’écoulement des éléments obéit à une très précise organisation : la réitération des plans est partitionnelle.
Simone Dompeyre
Download full article as pdf - 2017 Hammer Museum Experimental Women Filmmakers from Latin America Q&A
- 2017 Birkbeck University, London Q&A by Laura Mulvey
- 2017 Sight & Sound magazine The year In...Obama Era Cinema.
But elsewhere is always better mentioned as one of the five top movies of 2016 by Joanna Hogg
Download full article as PDF - 2013 Ha’aretz Splash
Come dive into the dark of an abandoned hangar in Jaffa and find yourselves inside a spray of waves splashing up against the grey walls, sunlight framing black shadows, birds diving and taking off towards the horizon, black and white stars spinning dizzyingly in the wind, and grainy images flickering within the frames.
Download full article as PDF - 2013 Movie Blogger NIKITA KINO
Nikita Kino gathers together Ostrovsky’s collection of 8 mn film footage of those visits mixes it with other film media to create a video collage that’s somewhere between a memoir and a travelogue.
Download full article as PDF - 2009 Sao Paulo TV Interview
Se for preciso uma definiçao para o trabalho de Vivian Ostrovsky, que seja cinema experimental.
Mas ela adverte que nao pretende provocar o costumeiros bocejos aos quais estao acostumados os espectadores dessa malfadada espécie de expressão artistica. - 2007 On Globo online Farois: Vivian Ostrovsky
Antes era uma Super 8. Agora é uma digital. O trabalho que faz se nutre amplamente de seu diario audivisual, que se intensifica nas muitas viagens.
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Carlos Alberto Mattos - 2006 Libération Un nuage de mensonges
…Arrêt sur nuage est un florilège décapant des propos tenus par les politiques, scientifiques et journalistes lors de la catastrophe de Tchernobyl survenu il y a vingt ans…
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Marc Laumônier - 2006 Village Voice Creatures Features
Vivian Ostrovsky’s half-hour compendium Ice/Sea is a celluloid aperitif for summertime, combining found footage of the world’s beaches with the director’s own archive of coastal material. Fun and free-associative, the movie ventures to Rio, Miami, Montpellier, the Dead and Black Seas, and elsewhere, keeping a visual diary of lumpy beach bods, boardwalk architecture, and celebrity sightings (Esther Williams, Elvis Presley in his Hawaiian incarnation). Ice/Sea also showcases a zoo’s worth of beachcombers: dogs, birds, a marauding tiger, and rounding out the first half of the title, smooching penguins. Enjoy those icebergs while they last!
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Jessica Winter - 2005 Libération Paris/Berlin, champ d'expériences
En regardant le formidable ICE/SEA de Vivian Ostrovsky, on comprend également qu’il ne suffit pas d’être touriste pour faire du cinéma….
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Elisabeth Lebovici et Annick Rivoire. - 2003 France Culture- NIKITA KINO Podcast
- 2000 Kunstmuseum Basel Conversation
The everyday series, sequence, list. The intrinsic use of music and rhythm. The dynamising element of the music and of the vocals and instrumentals and of the voices. The music becomes the canvas, I almost want to say the leading character, the protagonist.
Sissi Tax
Download full article as PDF - 1998 Tagesspiegel & Taz Berlin Delikatessen-Seltsamer Alltag
Sie stammen von Vivian Ostrovsky, einer geborenen Globetrotterin. Schließlich kam sie als Tochter russischer und
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Tschechischer Eltern in New York zum Welt, ging in Rio de Janeiro zur Schule und studierte anschließend an der Sorbonne in Paris.
Dortgründete sie in den siebziger Jahren den feministischen. Filmverleih Ciné-Femmes, und von dort aus bereist si seit fünfzehn Jahren die Welt. - 1997 Falter – Die Press Nouvelles de la zone du transit
L’art ne fait pas que parler, il fait aussi chanter. Qu’elle flâne dans les rues de Kyoto avec sa caméra super-8 ou qu’elle appuie sur le bouton dans le métro de New York, Vivian Ostrovsky fait chanter le monde. L’ironique écart vis-à-vis du home-movie ou du film touristique donne ses premiers signes sur la singulière bande-son de ses courts métrages.
Die Press, Stefan Grissemann
Download full article as PDF - 1995 Vivian Ostrovsky Mostra fotografia e cinema
1. F i l m a r :
Quase sempre em Super 8 sem som, em situação de documentário sem qualquer encenação e sem alterar o que surge diante da câmera. As filmagens podem ser cotidianas, na tradição do Kino-Glaz (Cinema-Olho) de Dziga Vertov e dos diários filmados (Jonas Mekas), não se sabendo previamente qual será o assunto. Qualquer viagem é sempre um bom pretexto para filmar. Ou as filmagens podem ser temáticas, com uma idéia inicial estabelecida, como M.M. IN MOTION, documentário sobre a coreógrafa francesa Mathilde Monnier e sua companhia de de dança contemporânea. Filmei os preparativos de 6 espetáculos, ensaios e bastidores durante 3 anos e meio.
Download full article as PDF - 1995 Washington Post M.M : All the Bright Moves
Ostrovsky has been an enthusiast of Monnier’s dance creations since 1986, when she saw her inaction at the Avignon Festival.
M.M. in Motion was four years in the making and draws upon Ostrovsky’s filming of six Monnier choreographies (dating from 88 to 91), in rehearsal and performance. The key feature of the film is that it attempts to translate into cinematic terms the very essence and style of Monnier’s dances.Alan M. Kriegsman
Download full article as PDF - 1992 yann beauvais MM in Motion
Ce travail des images s’accompagne comme toujours d’une bande-son élaborée qui mêle des réflexions de Mathilde Monnier aux musiques des spectacles.
Download full article as PDF - 1991 Chicago Tribune Reelism, repertory and revival
Cosmopolitan filmmaker Vivian Ostrovsky is on a cross-country tour with a batch of her wonderful little films. Made between 1982 and 1988, they offer a whimsical archaeology of the everyday-perceived by this visitor to New York, Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Milan, Rio, Amsterdam and Jerusalem.
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Bill Stamets - 1989 Jornal da tarde O olhar eletrônico de Vivian Ostrovsky em seis curtas
- 1989 O Estado de Sao Paulo O mundo en estilhaços de imagens
Se for preciso uma definiçao para o trabalho de Vivian Ostrovsky, que seja cinema experiemental. Mas ela adverte que nao pretende provocar ocostumeiros bocejos aos quais estao acostumados os espectadores dessa malfadada espécie de expressao artistica. Vivian que naceu en Nova York, mas viveu no Rio de Janeiro desde os novemeses até concluir osestudos secundarios, diz que faz filmes para si mesma. Elase diverte ao fazê-los. Talvez porisso mesmo ela consiga divertir os espectadores. Seu olho se fixa em imagens cotidianas que tods os olhos vêem, mas a decodificaçao bem-humorada disso nos poe diante de algo como «cenas que gostariamos de ver .
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Jim Joe
