Screening Room: Caroline Leaf y Mary Beams

Caroline Leaf’s animated work springs from her expert storytelling and pioneering animation techniques. One significant contribution to filmmaking is her technique of manipulating sand on a light-box, which she began as a student at Harvard. She later worked as an animator and director at the National Film Board of Canada.  Her film The Street garnered an Academy Award nomination in 1976. On this episode, she screens the remarkable The Owl Who Married a Goose: An Eskimo Legend and parts of The Street and The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa which were works-in-progress at the time. Visit her personal website at www.carolineleaf.com.

Mary Beams’ hand-drawn films carry themes of memory, erotic fantasy and feminism.  She taught animation at Harvard from 1972 to 1977, and by 1988, she was a partner in Media Ink, Inc., with a weekly animated political spot on NBC’s Sunday Today Show. She has also taught at the University of South Florida and Northern Illinois University. Here, she screens The Tub, Solo Film, Going Home Sketch-book, Piano Rub, and her work-in-progress, Quilt Film.

About the Screening Room series
In the early 1970s a group of idealistic artists, lawyers, doctors and teachers saw an opportunity to change commercial television in Boston and the surrounding area. It would require years of litigation up to and including the Supreme Court, but the case was won and the Channel 5 license was given to WCVB-TV. Screening Room was one of several programs offered in an effort to provide alternative television viewing. The idea behind Screening Room was to give independent filmmakers an opportunity to discuss their work and show it to a large urban audience. Nearly 100 ninety-minute programs were produced and aired between 1973 and 1980.

Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986).