Element1973

Camera: Hilary Harris; Performer: Amy Greenfield. ELEMENT, like TIDES, raises issues of the active image of a woman's body on film. The two films are counterparts and are ideally screened together. The woman's body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle which is both birthlike and deathlike and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal area of female sensuality. "In the well-known ELEMENT, Greenfield rolls and seethes and plunges in a field of mud, her hair, her face, her naked body [are] not just slathered with mud but become a part of it ...." – Deborah Jowitt, dance critic, The Village Voice Exhibition: Toulon Int'l Festival; Whitney Museum of American Art; Third Int'l Avant-Garde Film Festival, London; Film Forum, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY.