Breaking the Frame

Marielle Nitoslawska’s Breaking the Frame is a feature–length profile of the radical New York artist Carolee Schneemann. A pioneer of performance art and avant-garde cinema, Schneemann has been breaking the frames of the art world for five decades by challenging the taboos leveled against the female body. Breaking the Frame is a kinetic, hyper-cinematic intervention, a critical medita-tion on the intimate correlations animating art and life.

Praise for Breaking the Frame:

A work about a formidable artist that is itself an important work of art.

– Mark McElhatten, Views from the Avant-Garde, New York Film Festival.

Breaking the Frame plunges you into Ms. Schneemann’s past and present with few of the usual documentary signposts.

– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times.

Director Marielle Nitoslawska's faith in the power of imagery over pedantic expo-sition rewards the audience with a heady catalogue of Schneemann's luscious paintings, visceral hand-illustrated journals and excerpts from her corporeal films. Nitoslawska achieves her own form of engaging delirium by marrying her kaleidoscopic footage with overlapping conversations and a musical score by the avant-garde composer James Tenney.

– R.C. Baker, The Village Voice.

 Nitoslawska deserves special credit for the way her film is about more than the artist’s oeuvre and impact without resorting to mawkish biography.

– David Cohen, ARTCRITICAL.

Elliptical in its account, Breaking the Frame rhymes with the sensual quality of Schneeman's own body of work, framed as revelatory.

– Artspace: New Art Documentaries to Watch in 2014

Moving trains, changing seasons and Schneemann’s cat on the windowsill, watching, always watching, advance like stepping-stones along a symbolic laby-rinth, navigating Schneemann’s art and life.

– Joyce Beckenstein, The Brooklyn Rail

 The effect is haunting and hallucinatory, particularly when viewed in the dark of a cinema.

– Iain Millar, The Art Newspaper.

Nitoslawska crafted a total artwork evoking an epochal tonality. Breaking the Frame functions as an amalgamation of poem, dream journal, photo album, labor-atory log, cultural memento, archeological dig, and liberation manual for an era of artistic experimentation and confrontation. In short, it is as much a cultural time capsule as a biographical testament.

– G. Roger Denson, Huffington Post.