Barbara Sternberg

Barbara Sternberg

Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Ontario Cinematheque, Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries including the University of Guelph, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Dunlop Art Gallery, as well as the Universite d'Avignon, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life- questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video. Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists' film and video exhibition group. She wrote a handbook and conducted workshops on Media Literacy for high school teachers. She recently organized the "Association for Film Art" (AFFA) to actively support and promote awareness and appreciation of film art. While living in the Maritimes, Sternberg co-founded Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick. Sternberg wrote a column, "On (experimental) Film" for several years for Cinema Canada, and has written essays on artists and on filmmakers. As well, she has written on the status of film art in galleries and museums—an issue on which she has conducted symposia and lobbied vigorously.

  • Title: Barbara Sternberg
  • Popularity: 0.773
  • Known For: Directing
  • Birthday: 1945-03-24
  • Place of Birth: Toronto, Canada
  • Homepage: http://www.barbarasternberg.com/
  • Also Known As:
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Barbara Sternberg Movies

  • 1990
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    Antigone

    Antigone

    1 1990 HD

    “Shot in an abandoned warehouse, documenting a contemporary adaptation of the Oedipus story by a group of Toronto experimental filmmakers,...

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  • 2002
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    Burning

    Burning

    1 2002 HD

    "Your life is like a candle burning. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning." (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar)

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  • 2020
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    Once I Am

    Once I Am

    1 2020 HD

    The day as it went along – feeling the light of the present…what else is there?

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  • 2016
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    The Human Condition

    The Human Condition

    1 2016 HD

    Ideas about how we live in the world as humans, the difficulties faced, the conditions of our brief existence, accompany us consciously or...

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  • 2010
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    Carl Brown

    Carl Brown

    1 2010 HD

    A short video documentary by Barbara Sternberg, approximating the dual-screen approach of the titular filmmaker. Brown speaks candidly, is shown in a...

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  • 2010
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    vers(ing)

    vers(ing)

    1 2010 HD

    vers(ing) opens in a coffee shop. People, sit, enter and exit. A conversation is heard. The video continues, traveling through the streets of a city,...

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  • 2023
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    touch

    touch

    1 2023 HD

    touch (ing), -(ed): Feel, move, affect, be in contact, tangent to, in relation; injure slightly; slightly crazy "My window tonight casts light out...

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  • 1982
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    Transitions

    Transitions

    1 1982 HD

    Transitions is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being in-between-between falling...

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  • 2023
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    Sunprints 1, 2, 3

    Sunprints 1, 2, 3

    1 2023 HD

    Based loosely on the tripartite plan of Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), the film was made by applying cyanotype chemistry to...

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  • 2002
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    Burning

    Burning

    1 2002 HD

    "Your life is like a candle burning. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning." (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar)

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  • 1979
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    Opus 40

    Opus 40

    1 1979 HD

    Opus 40” is about repetition: repetition in working and living, repetition through multiplicity and series, repetition to form pattern and...

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  • 2000
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    Like a Dream that Vanishes

    Like a Dream that Vanishes

    4.667 2000 HD

    "Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal...

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  • 2004
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    Surfacing

    Surfacing

    1 2004 HD

    Our busy comings and goings, on the move, working at life are pictured, but layers of images and scratched emulsion make viewing through the depths...

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  • 1994
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    beating

    beating

    1 1994 HD

    To get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and...

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  • 1991
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    Through and Through

    Through and Through

    1 1991 HD

    The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger; and...

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  • 2007
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    Time Being I – IV

    Time Being I – IV

    1 2007 HD

    Brief moments of being, fleeting bits out of the surrounding chaos. These 4 shorts films can be shown separately or one after the other on the roll.

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  • 1985
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    A Trilogy

    A Trilogy

    1 1985 HD

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  • 2005
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    Praise

    Praise

    1 2005 HD

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  • 1997
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    midst

    midst

    1 1997 HD

    In midst, Barbara Sternberg has made a lyrical film about attachment, integration, belonging. Many of the familiar elements of Sternberg's work are...

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  • 2014
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    COLOUR THEORY

    COLOUR THEORY

    1 2014 HD

    Goethe’s colour theory dealt with the optics of colour relations; Rudolf Steiner’s and Kandinsky’s theories attribute emotional,...

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  • 1997
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    Awake

    Awake

    1 1997 HD

    A bedroom (and life) viewed from the horizontal, while wondering whether to join in the race or wake up to the illusion. The soundtrack quotes from...

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  • 1990
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    At Present

    At Present

    1 1990 HD

    This film is about love - relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is...

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  • 1997
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    C’est la vie

    C’est la vie

    10 1997 HD

    A mini-presentation of consciousness dealing with cosmos. The world in a grain of sand. Connections between life, death, and the world are neither...

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  • 2007
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    Once

    Once

    1 2007 HD

    "Poetry, film, light, life. An excerpt from Rilke's Ninth Elegy [...] evokes the beauty and brevity of life. Images shimmer in an uncanny light. We...

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  • 2014
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    Far From

    Far From

    1 2014 HD

    Constructed with repetitions and variations, in reference to the musical form of a Nocturne, “Far From” is an accumulation of layers, a...

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  • 1996
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    What Do You Fear?

    What Do You Fear?

    1 1996 HD

    A dog and two cats in France living, naturally.

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  • 2014
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    Love Me

    Love Me

    1 2014 HD

    Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating – emotions which conflict, confuse, are difficult to...

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  • 1988
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    Tending Towards the Horizontal

    Tending Towards the Horizontal

    1 1988 HD

    The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its...

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  • 2000
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    Like a Dream that Vanishes

    Like a Dream that Vanishes

    4.667 2000 HD

    "Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal...

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  • 1994
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    beating

    beating

    1 1994 HD

    To get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and...

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  • 2008
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    After Nature

    After Nature

    1 2008 HD

    After Nature, after the Fall, after all - where do we go from here? Digital imagery and optically printed superimpositions combine in a cascading...

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  • 2014
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    Time Being V-VI

    Time Being V-VI

    10 2014 HD

    Brief moments of being, fleeting bits of the surrounding chaos.

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  • 2017
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    The Earth in the Sea

    The Earth in the Sea

    1 2017 HD

    Videoed off projected super 8 footage, this short film in four parts (titles from Artaud: “ the earth in the sea, the air in the earth, the...

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  • 2008
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    Beginning and Ending

    Beginning and Ending

    1 2008 HD

    Images flutter and flicker in orgasmic rhythms. Visual references to Bataille’s “solar anus”, to romantic coupling, to monkeys and...

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  • 2011
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    In the Nature of Things

    In the Nature of Things

    1 2011 HD

    The central image of in the nature of things is the Forest- sometimes fearful, sometimes a refuge, always mysterious, and the multiple associations...

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  • 2003
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    Tabula Rasa

    Tabula Rasa

    1 2003 HD

    The sensual, with its beauty and possibility of decay, is set beside immutable statues of the Virgin Mary. Images from technological viewing of the...

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  • 2004
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    In the Garden

    In the Garden

    1 2004 HD

    Where does 'I' leave off and the 'world' begin; when does 'past' end and 'present' begin? Images blurring boundaries suggest the relatedness of...

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  • 2004
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    So What?

    So What?

    1 2004 HD

    Emotions come & go; so do people. The world is an awful & awesome place; so is the mind. We hear dark inner thoughts of a person & see people taking...

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  • 2019
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    Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    1 2019 HD

    There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose...

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  • 2019
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    Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    1 2019 HD

    There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose...

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  • 2019
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    Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    1 2019 HD

    There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose...

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  • 2021
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    Anything is Everything

    Anything is Everything

    1 2021 HD

    Anything is Everything is composed of sequences of disparate footage, but with threads to follow: circular shapes from outer and terrestrial space;...

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