Perhaps more photographed than any other image, WATER has provided an endless inspiration to a countless number of artists working in almost every film genre. Balagan will honor WATER with a program of its own, H20 "a wet and dripping series of films and videos inspired by the greatest element. Films will include the incredible 1929 masterpiece "H20" by Ralf Steiner as well as "The Quarry" (Shot in Quincy, MA in 1970) by the late Richard Rogers. Among filmmakers featured are Ralph Steiner, Richard Rogers, Barbara Hammer, Stan Brakhage, Elida Schogt and others.

H2O 16mm, 14min, 1929
Director: Ralph Steiner

"a theme of water in all its forms - an inspiration for the program..." - Balagan

Born in 1899 in Cleveland to a lower-class Czech family, Ralph Steiner studied chemical engineering at Dartmouth before starting his career in photography. In 1921 he began studying at the Clarence H. White School of Photography. One of his first jobs was to make illustrative plates for Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North and Steiner experimented in making his own avant-garde films, including H20 and Mechanical Principles. He continued his exploration with film and photography by attending the artists' colony in Yaddo, yet relied on advertising work for most of his income, submitting his work to periodicals such as The Ladies' Home Journal. In 1926 or 1927 he met Paul Strand in New York and became a founding member of the Film and Photo League. Steiner taught at the Harry Alan Potamkin Film School and was described by Samuel Brody as "the healthiest and most sincere artist in the 'avant-garde' of the bourgeois cinema and photo." Agreeing with Leo Hurwitz's outlook on the aesthetics of documentary film, Steiner broke from the FPL to start Nykino. Believing it difficult to capture immediate events, especially with police intervention and time constraints, Steiner saw the limits of the documentary and wished to expand its potential. Following Strand and Hurwitz, he left Nykino to form Frontier Films. He was a cameraman for Pare Lorentz in addition to shooting films for Frontier, such as People of the Cumberland and The City. After The City, Steiner broke from Van Dyke and Frontier Films and went to Hollywood where he was a writer/executive for four years. He then returned to commercial photography and film making. His other jobs included picture editor for PM magazine and photographic assignments for Fortune. Steiner moved to Vermont in 1963, spending the rest of his twenty three years photographing images of the coast. - http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/Huffman/Frontier/steiner.html

Selected Bibliography
Steiner, Ralph. A Point of View. Middletwon, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978.
Steiner, Ralph. In Spite of Everything, Yes. Albuquerque: Published for Harwood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, by University of New Mexico, 1986.
Steiner, Ralph. In Pursuit of Clouds: Images and Metaphors. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985.

Quarry 16mm, 12min, 1970
Director: Richard Rogers

This portrait of an abandoned quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts, captures the striking natural beauty of the site as it explores the social rites of the young people who gather along its rugged shores to create leisure in what was once a place of toil.

"Richard P. Rogers (1944–2001) maintained two full-time careers: he was a celebrated director and producer of (mostly nonfiction) films and an inspired teacher of still photography and filmmaking here at Harvard. Rogers’s appetite for knowledge was omnivorous, taking him from the jungles of Nicaragua to the fountains of Rome, from the bedrooms of colonial New England to the streets of working-class Albany, New York. Throughout these travels, his unsparing artist’s eye turned as often back onto himself: touching on a range of topics from art and architecture to history and literature, his films spoke in many voices, from the politically engaged to the personal and experimental. Among his best known works are two long-form independent documentaries, Living at Risk and Pictures from a Revolution (both collaborations with Susan Meiselas and Alfred Guzzetti); an award-winning portrait of William Carlos Williams, made for the PBS poetry series "Voices and Visions"; and the dramatic feature A Midwife’s Tale. At Harvard he was mentor to a new generation of committed filmmakers, and under his directorship, the Film Study Center became an important catalyst for nonfiction production. During his brave battle with illness last year, he continued to teach full time and to work on an independent documentary about the social, economic, and ecological changes affecting the community on Long Island where he lived for many years". - Harvard Film Archive

Water for Maya 16mm, 5min, 2000
Director: Stan Brakhage

WATER FOR MAYA is a hand-painted work which came into being during a film interview with Martina Kudlacek about Maya Deren. There was a sudden recognition of Maya's intrinsic love of water and thus of all Mayan liquidity in magic conjunction, reflection, etc.

"Stan Brakhage made almost 400 films in his fifty-year career, ranging from psychodramas to near-documentaries to completely abstract works. His films display great sensual beauty, and reveal complex and profound meanings. He made film worthy of the other arts not by documenting art but by creating uniquely cinematic forms that reflect his many influences from poetry, music, painting, and dance. Brakhage is perhaps best known as an advocate of the first-person mode, of films that reflect their maker's individual vision, but much of his work eludes categorization, and part of his project was to constantly expand notions of "subjectivity" and "self." Creating visual music by focusing on organizing light moving within the time and space of cinema, he also made films that, in their relentless avoidance of predictability, renew themselves, and the viewer, at each instant of their unspooling..." - Fred Camper

Pools 16mm, 6min, 1981
Director: Barbara Hammer made with Barbara Klutinis.

"POOLS is a pictorially and technically impressive sampling of spectacular swimming pools at W.R. Hearst's San Simeon and manages to validate itself from within, or at least within its own frame of identification." -- Richard T. Jameson

"My aesthetics in co-making POOLS with Barbara Klutinis was to bring an experiential and physiological sense of the body to the members of the audience watching the film in terms of the locations, the swimming pools designed by the first woman architect to graduate from the School of Beaux Arts in Paris, Julia Morgan. I want the viewers to have the experience of swimming in architectural space for two reasons. First and foremost, I want to activate my audience, I want them to come alive, not be passive through watching cinema, and then to extend that "aliveness" into their lives through conscious expansive living and responsible politics. The second reason I swam and filmed in those pools was to break a taboo. No visitors are allowed to swim in these gorgeous examples of Morgan's work. At least by getting permission to swim there myself with an underwater camera I could extend through vision this extraordinary physical experience." - Barbara Hammer

Barbara Hammer, an internationally recognized film artist who has made over eighty films and videos, is considered a pioneer of lesbian-feminist experimental cinema. She is known for creating groundbreaking experimental films dealing with women's issues on gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family. Hammer is responsible for some of the first lesbian-made films in history, including such landmarks experimental shorts as Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976). Hammer earned an MA in film at San Francisco State University and took courses in multimedia digital studies at the American Film Institute. Her most recent work focuses on global issues outside her community: Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions (2000) and My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities (2001). Some of her films are included in the permanent collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Kurtal - Snake Spirit video, 28min, 2003 (Australia) tentative
Director: Nicole Ma and Michelle Mahrer

Kurtal - Snake Spirit tells the story of Spider, a sprightly 80 year old Aboriginal elder who travels from Fitzroy Crossing into the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia to visit a jila - a sacred waterhole. Spider is one of the main custodians responsible for the practices that take place there. For the first time, he is taking his family and community elders back to his birthplace, where he will communicate with their ancestors through Kurtal, the Snake Spirit in an ancient ritual.

Kurtal - Snake Spirit is co-directed by Nicole Ma and Michelle Mahrer, two multi award winning filmmakers renown for their dance films with indigenous communities throughout the world.

Water Wars: Struggle in the Holy Land video, 28min, 1997 tentative
Director: Iain Taylor

Could the war of the next century be over water rather than oil or politics? Demand for this most basic of resources is outstripping supply in some parts of the world and it is in these areas that the seeds of future wars have already been sown. Struggle in the Holy Land focuses on the apparent water inequalities between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. While settlers enjoy water luxuries like swimming pools and garden sprinklers, nearby Palestinian villages can go without piped water for months at a time and are prohibited from investing in new wells.

Salt of the Sea 16mm, 4 min, 1965 tentative
Director: Saul Levine

Founded under water ... all at sea ... made at land.

Saul Levine has been making films since 1964. He works in Regular 8, Super 8. 16MM, and DV. His works have been shown on every contintent except Antarctica. Saul has been a film professor since 1968 and teaching at Mass College of Arts for the last 22 years.

Zyklon Portrait 16mm, 13min, 1999 (Canada) tentative
Director: Elida Schogt

"A Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery, "Zyklon Portrait" combines archival instructional films with family snapshots, home movies, underwater photography, and hand-painted imagery for an expressive exploration of how history and memory are related to one family's loss. "...Elida Schogt's deeply moving portrait of her family's experience during the Holocaust...wisely privileges the subjective response over any attempts at historical objectivity. Beginning with a hypermeticulous analysis of Zyklon B, the gas used to kill millions in the concentration camps, the documentary approach quickly fractures into a necessarily personal one, underscoring the impossibility of making sense of the senseless. Skillfully weaving archival footage and the conventional documentary's dispassionate voice of authority with family photos and her mother's cautious words, Schogt creates a palpable tension between these irreconcilable elements. The commanding voice of the narrator continually dissolves into the reticent voice of her mother, whose insistence on the indescribable nature of these events resonates with an even greater legitimacy....The film is a fitting testament to the unspeakable nature of these horrors and to the courage of those who have to struggle to summon up the words to even begin to describe them." - Barbara Goslawski, Take One: Film & Television in Canada

Elida Schogt has an MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York, where she studied film production and theory. Elida's deeply personal trilogy of short documentaries on Holocaust memory: "Zyklon Portrait" (1999), "The Walnut Tree" (2000) and "Silent Song" (2001) have been screened around the globe, garnering numerous awards - most notably for the début film: The Grand Prize at the Bilbao International Festival of Documentary & Short Film and Special Mention for Best Independent Canadian Film of Hot Docs: Canadian International Documentary Festival. Elida's films challenge standard categorization, combining documentary, narrative and experimental elements to reveal complex humanexperiences. Elida lives and works in Toronto, Canada.