in memoriam: amy halpern

Tenderness, vitality and sensuousness grace the experimental films of Amy Halpern (1953-2022), a filmmaker, curator, cinematographer, (uncontracted) educator and typist (for a Women’s magazine), who spent her formative years in New York City. She was one of the founding members of The Collective for Living Cinema in 1972, an explorative and somewhat delirious initiative that sought to problematize the certainties of film canons and challenged the hierarchies planted in moving image culture across industry, experimental film and the art world. She worked for the Collective in the initial years as an organizer and curator before moving to Los Angeles in 1974-75 where she continued to live until her death in 2022, though always identifying as a New Yorker. In later years, the Collective went on to garner many accolades for its significant footprint in the cultural landscape of the city, while Halpern’s integral association with it was progressively marginalized to the point of being forgotten.
From a very early age, Halpern was interested in luminism and the nature of things. Her perception of the world was symbiocenic where everyday objects, plants, landscapes, animals and humans coexist in their characteristic rhythms and graceful physicality. The intimate and sensuously responsive nature of her films balance the thorough formal considerations with regard to space, light, use (or non-use) of sound, montage and temporality. In her early films made in Manhattan, Three Preparations and Peach Landscape, (presented here as part of an opus, Opus I: Three Preparations / A Glance / Peach Landscape (1972-1973)) Halpern playfully explores how light describes an object and its volume can determine framing. Such painterly compositional interest would persist in Halpern’s work, for example in her landscape films such as Slow Fireworks (2019) and Verge (2022).

The other art historical genre that manifests prominently in Halpern’s films is portraiture. While filming humans, Halpern displays a Warhol-like faith in her characters, trusting their charisma to shine in the face of scrutiny by the camera lens. Her delicate and quaint portrait of her mother in Ma Sewing (2021) comprises a number of brief takes in fading natural light with particular attention granted to her garment, gestures, movement, posture and glance at the camera. It is as compact and as powerful a portrait as any in 90 seconds. Halpern had shot the film in 1991.

In her portrayal of newts, (in Newt Pauses (2016), Newt Leaders (2020), Fire Belly (2021), 4 Fingers 5 Toes (2022)) we encounter a range of filmic choices evincing theatricality (Newt Pauses), film’s material-representational role (Newt Leaders), the playful possibilities that lie between abstraction and figuration (Fire Belly) and film’s capacity to be a tool for scientific observation (4 Fingers 5 Toes), of extremely rare chromatic quality no less. Such films seem deceptively simple – a role or two of film used in the pursuit of an object of fondness. Though such a primary connection to the profilmic is integral for Halpern, her formal choices are critical. In Newt Pauses, Halpern had fiddled with the idea of using a jazz bass-line at the beginning and at the end of the film, however its comic rendition of the newts’ movement convinced her that the film was meant to be silent. In doing so, Halpern avoids naïve romanticisation and exoticisation, not necessarily in favor of cold observation, but for a cognizance of the diversity of our ecosystem, and though not explicitly articulated, the dangers of habitat fragmentation and pollution it faces.

(Arindam Sen)