Kathryn Ramey Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Kathryn Ramey
Directing
Biography
Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing and various direct animation techniques. Her scholarly interest is focused on the social history of the avant-garde film community, the anthropology of visual communication and the intersection between avant-garde and ethnographic film and art practices. Her films have screened at festivals and other venues including the Toronto Film Festival, the TriBeCa film festival, 25fps Experimental Film Festival, Jihlava Documentary Film Festival, Alchemy Film Festival, Cinepoesia/Bogota Experimental Film Festival and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.
Filmography Movies
Production
El Signo Vacío
EL SIGNO VACÍO (the empty sign) is a feature length cinematic essay interrogating the 120-year US occupation of Puerto Rico and the filmmaker’s bizarre connection to it via her surname, RAMEY, to reveal how US democratic narratives effectively obscure her capitalist/military domination of the islands.
Yanqui WALKER and the OPTICAL REVOLUTION
This film explores a now-obscure American expansionist, William Walker, who through military force and coercion became president of Nicaragua in 1856. Walker was one of many expansionists who believed it was America's Manifest Destiny to conquer all of the Americas and who engaged in border raids in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Filmmaker Kathryn Ramey blends found footage, documentary photography, ethnographic inquiry, and personal travelogue with experimental film techniques such as hand-processing, optical printing, and time-lapse to detour and derail the various approaches to historymaking that have been applied to this story.
ENOLAEMEVAEL/LEAVEMEALONE
An unfaithful remake of Man Ray’s 1926 “Emak Bakia” made without the use of a motion picture camera, ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE is a nonsensical response to brutality alongside a celebration of silver process. The film uses a variety unconventional image making and hand-printing strategies to achieve its hi-contrast jittery style including contact printing with a mag-light taped to a sync block and hand-processing in a bucket. No conventional motion picture processes/tools/labs were used. The film is meant to be played/looped at 24fps with the soundtrack provided by the image.
Fall U.S.
“When a heterosexual dude makes a film about his kids, that is very political. When a woman makes a film that engages with the act of being a parent, it’s often seen as less significant. That shows how political it is because even now, motherhood is a terrible double bind. When I was expecting my first child, I was told by more than one female filmmaker, ‘Forget it, you’re done, you’ll never make a film again.’” –Kathryn Ramey, in dialogue with Sarah Keller & Yangqiao Lu
WEST: What I Know About Her
A 15-minute experimental documentary juxtaposing two 'hers': the American WEST via the Oregon Trail and Elizabeth Crandall Perry, adventurer, midwife, mother of fourteen and the filmmaker's great great grandmother.
LIMEN
LIMEN - threshold. between two states of being. the boundary of perception.
BETTER LIGHTING
An agitprop made from two 30-second GE adverts from the 1970's repurposed to rebuke the role white women voters in the US have chosen to uphold white supremacy and the patriarchy instead of supporting the interests of women and anyone who loves them.