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Stranger Baby, Lana Lin, 1995, 16mm, 14 mins

Remembrance: A Portrait Study, Edward Owens, 1967, 16mm, 6 mins

Melting, Thom Andersen, 1965, 16mm, 6 mins

Window Water Baby Moving, Stan Brakhage, 1959, 16mm, 12 mins

A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs, 2019, 16mm, 14 mins

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This program explores the liminal spaces women inhabit, between alienation and recognition, birth and decay, memory and materiality. Through experimental forms and poetic meditations, the selected works trace the fragile, often invisible transitions that define our lives, particularly for women navigating the intersections of identity, history, and the unknowable. These are intimate portraits and abstract invocations of daughters, mothers, and grandmothers – figures caught at the edge of transformation.

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Whether confronting mortality, narrating displacement, or revealing the quiet weight of domestic labor, each film bears witness to the evolving contours of gendered and cultural embodiment. Some meditate on decay and disappearance, others on emergence and becoming. Across flickering textures, fragmented voices, and tender image-crafting, we encounter bodies in motion, in memory, in rupture. Together, these films form a conversation around visibility, estrangement, and impermanence, speaking to thresholds of birth, of becoming, and of return.

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The works in this program are united not by linear narrative, but by a shared sensibility: one that embraces ambiguity, silence, gesture, and fragmentation. The filmmakers use the formal properties of 16mm film – grain, exposure, light leaks, and analog deterioration – not just as aesthetic choices, but as expressive tools that mirror the ephemerality and fragility of the experiences they depict. In this way, the materiality of film itself becomes a metaphor for memory, aging, and transformation. These are films that hold space for slowness and stillness, that invite viewers to sit with discomfort and beauty in equal measure. 

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​The word “tremble” suggests a subtle, involuntary motion, something fragile, maybe afraid, maybe overwhelmed. It immediately calls to mind the body: hands shaking, a lip quivering, even a film frame flickering. It’s about thresholds of feeling, when something is just about to shift or collapse or emerge. “Lines” evokes boundaries: between people, between roles, between past and present, body and image, life and death. These are not hard lines; they tremble, blur, and waver. There’s also a subtle reference to film itself; the “lines” of film, the tremble of a projector, the fragility of celluloid or tape. It resonates with experimental and analog aesthetics, echoing the textures and materials of the works selected. It’s open to interpretation. Is “tremble line” a border? A fault line? A moment of vulnerability? A transformation about to happen? That ambiguity mirrors the ephemeral, fragmented, and poetic qualities of the selected works.

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This program began as a way for me to explore how film can hold the delicate transitions that shape our lives, especially for women, and especially within diasporic and marginalized contexts. While not every film in this program is explicitly about women of color or their lived experiences, I was drawn to the way their metaphors gestured toward those narratives: the feeling of being unmoored, of shapeshifting to survive, of becoming and unbecoming across time. In these works, I found echoes of the cultural inheritances I carry, both spoken and unspoken. Their images reminded me of the women I know, the women who raised me, and the versions of myself I am still discovering. 

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There is something deeply personal and quietly political about turning toward experimental cinema to find these resonances. These films often live on the periphery, shown in archives, microcinemas, zines, and festivals rather than commercial screens. And yet, they speak volumes in their smallness. In their refusal to explain, in their commitment to abstraction, they preserve something precious: the right to opacity, the right to feel without having to name. ​I offer this program as an invitation to listen, to linger, to remember, and perhaps to see yourself reflected in the tremble of a frame.

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Stranger Baby, Lana Lin, 1995, 16mm, 14 mins

A fractured, hybrid narrative oscillating between documentary, science fiction, and poetic collage, Stranger Baby listens as voices speculate on meaning, desire, and fear, often revealing more about the speaker than the subject. Blurred images resist interpretation while the voiceover loops through racialized assumptions and cultural projections. Through this fragmentation, Lana Lin offers a haunting meditation on what it means to be seen as “alien”: unknowable, yet constantly defined by the gaze. The film becomes a portrait of the daughter-self – foreign, seductive, estranged – whose identity is shaped as much by cultural surveillance as by internal reckoning. Sound and image never settle into coherence, emphasizing a restless embodiment, a body flickering in and out of visibility. Lin’s film speaks to diasporic and gendered alienation with tender defiance, asserting the power of opacity and the right to remain misunderstood. 

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Remembrance: A Portrait Study, Edward Owens, 1967, 16mm, 6 mins

In Edward Owens’ Remembrance: A Portrait Study, domestic space becomes a shimmering stage, as three Black women – his mother and her friends – perform gestures of glamour and weariness in equal measure. Shot through a lens of deep love and longing, the film is an experimental portrait steeped in the texture of memory, shadowed light, and pop music drifting in like half-remembered dreams. Owens, a young, queer Black filmmaker, reframes the women’s everyday elegance as something sacred, capturing not only their beauty but their burden, their interiority, their histories that stretch beyond the frame. It’s a portrait of matriarchs not in the traditional sense, but in the intimate ritual of presence: their laughter, their silence, their gaze. With every flicker of the reel, we see a lineage sustained by softness and survival. It’s a memory as much as it is an offering; tender, quiet, and radical in its refusal to explain. 

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Melting, Thom Andersen, 1965, 16mm, 6 mins

A strawberry sundae slowly dissolves under the camera’s watchful eye. In Melting, this everyday object becomes an allegorical vessel for time, labor, and the quiet collapse of form. Its disintegration evokes the soft undoing of identity under the weight of domestic repetition – maternal sacrifice rendered literal in cream and syrup. The visual metaphor is simple but devastating: something once whole and sweet becoming excess, waste, ruin. Andersen’s camera doesn’t look away from the transformation, instead lingering in its decay, making visible the emotional erosion often hidden in caregiving and gendered roles. What begins as food ends as entropy; fragile beauty overtaken by time’s indifferent gravity. The film invites us to consider how bodies and roles slowly dissolve under pressure, how nourishment turns into loss. It’s an elegy for what is used up in love, and what slips quietly down the drain.

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Window Water Baby Moving, Stan Brakhage, 1959, 16mm, 12 mins

Stan Brakhage’s camera trembles with awe and terror as it records the birth of his daughter. A raw, unflinching act of witnessing that teeters between reverence and rupture. Window Water Baby Moving is at once painfully intimate and transcendent: a film of blood, water, breath, and light. In documenting his wife’s labor, Brakhage confronts the threshold where life begins and womanhood transforms. There is no narration, no framing device, just the body’s instinctive choreography, pulsing and unguarded. The film is a reverie on creation and vulnerability, where motherhood appears not as trope, but as elemental event. It doesn’t just show birth; it immerses us in its mystery, its violence, its sacredness. On transforming and becoming, this film stands at the precipice; a threshold few have dared to film with such immediacy. It is both document and dream, a visceral invocation of origin.

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A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs, 2019, 16mm, 14 mins

In A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs brings voice and shape to the quiet solitude of filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s residency on Cape Cod in 1998. Composed posthumously from Hammer’s footage and journals, the film becomes a tender collaboration across time, a meditation on aging, solitude, and presence in nature. Hammer’s handwritten notes, weathered frames, and intimate observations ripple through Sachs’ thoughtful editing, where light and wind become companions, and silence carries weight. This is a film about endings and continuities, about being with oneself and noticing the world’s softest details: the flap of a curtain, the curve of a dune, the creak of a wooden door. It resists spectacle, favoring a sustained attunement to stillness and change. As Hammer’s presence lingers in voice and vision, the film becomes a love letter to her life and to the lives of women artists who have, for so long, made beauty from the margins. In each frame, we are reminded that disappearance doesn’t mean erasure, and that memory, like film, flickers even when the light fades.

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Runtime 52 minutes.

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Q&A + A Portrait Study workshop with filmmaker Lynne Sachs

The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Lynne Sachs, offering insight into her creative process and experimental approach, honoring her work and that of the late Barbara Hammer. A participatory workshop and zine table will invite attendees to craft, reflect, and engage more deeply with the themes of memory, embodiment, and transformation.

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Cover image from A Month of Single Frames.

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***This curatorial proposal is a hypothetical, non-commercial project created for educational purposes. All films and materials referenced remain the intellectual property of their original artists and rights holders.