The Block Museum

Collection Spotlight: Gillian Wearing, Video Still (Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face), 1995-96

Artist: Gillian Wearing (British, born 1963) Title: Video Still (Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face)...

Collection Spotlight: Gillian Wearing, Video Still (Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face), 1995-96 Artist: Gillian Wearing (British, born 1963) Title: Video Still (Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face) Date: 1995‒96 Medium: Reversal film dye coupler print Dimensions: 16 3/4 in x 23 1/4 in Credit: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.60....

In New York in the fall of 1969, writer-producer-director Karen Sperling began shooting MAKE A FACE, a 35mm feature in which she plays the leading role of Nina, a young artist plagued by hallucinations. Filmed largely inside her own New York City apartment, MAKE A FACE is a defiantly dissociative psychodrama, in which a woman confronts intimations of exploitation and her own fears mirroring a backdrop of cultural collapse. Though Sperling grew up in the milieu of the movie business as a member of the Warner family, MAKE A FACE rejects classical Hollywood models of narrative cohesion and realism. Instead, the film makes boldly expressive use of production design, split-screens, and superimpositions to realize a subjective vision of cinema in which a character’s dreams, fantasies, and daily realities have equal expression and value. 

Released in 1971, MAKE A FACE appeared at major international film festivals and premiered at The Carnegie Hall Cinema in New York, where Sperling and the film were the subject of numerous profiles and reviews in the New York Times, Village Voice and international media. Over the decades, the original 35mm prints and negatives were lost and discarded, leaving only video transfers and a single 16mm reduction print extant.

Working with Karen Sperling, Block Cinema has created a new digital transfer of the last remaining film print, which will screen for the first time in five decades.

Screening the new digital transfer on Friday, May 15 at 7PM with filmmaker Karen Sperling in person. Free & open to the public.