Directed by Shellie Fleming

Approx. 80 min • 16mm

During the course of her time in Chicago, artist and educator Shellie Fleming touched the lives of innumerable people passing through the city’s film scene. While Fleming passed in 2013, the impressions she made can still be felt, not just in her many acolytes who have remained local (including the author of this capsule), but throughout the entire spectrum of international artist cinema, with a number of her former students considered among today’s most important and respected living filmmakers. While Shellie’s influence on the contemporary film world has been significant, it’s been exerted quietly. Her own 16mm films have screened infrequently throughout the 21st century, but their formal innovations and emotional depths have earned her a standing among connoisseurs of experimental cinema as one of the best filmmakers of the ’80s and ’90s. The films in this program prove this reputation justified, wedding optically-printed reveries with practical explications of the filmmaking process, Fleming’s own evocative writing sharing space with sounds and images appropriated from classic Hollywood cinema, coalescing into an inimitable body of work as curious, intelligent, and sensitive as the woman who made it. Included in this program are the films Left-Handed Memories (1989), Private Property (Public Domain) (1991), Ornithology (1995), and Life/Expectancy (1999).