Amy Halpern obituary: experimental filmmaker and cinematographer
Amy Halpern was an American independent filmmaker and cinematographer, who ardently advocated for experimental film and collaborative practices.
Hands beckon us in the films of Amy Halpern. They invoke and they conjure, summoning us from the dark beyond of the film frame. In several of her rich, poetic and associative 16mm shorts, hands move deliberately through gestures like a rhythmic dance or, as Halpern herself described it in the synopsis to her short film Invocation (1982), a “temporary sculpture”, casting shapes and shadows in the darkness.
Halpern often used bodies in her films – her own and those of friends and collaborators. Her only feature, Falling Lessons (1992) is a kinetic montage of almost 200 faces shot in vertical tilts. Featuring filmmakers such as Alex Cox, Julie Dash, Shirley Clarke, Chick Strand and Michael Snow, it functions on one level as a group portrait of a social scene, not unlike Warhol’s Screen Tests. But it’s also both a formalist study of eye contact and an indictment of police violence against the Black community in LA. Musician Ornette Coleman would call it “a healing film… it should be shown in mental institutions, to the patients and the doctors alike.”
This interest in physical gesture and corporeal movement can be traced back to Halpern’s training as a dancer. Born and raised in New York, as a teenager Halpern performed in the Lynda Gudde Dance Company and was a student of Anna Sokolow and Meredith Baylis. But she grew increasingly frustrated with the limitations of dance as a medium for self-expression. Though she didn’t consider herself an actor, Halpern was naturally charismatic and would go on to perform in colleagues’ work, making a particularly memorable appearance in Strand’s feminist masterpiece, Soft Fiction (1979).
Halpern briefly studied at the State University of New York in Binghamton in 1970, whose cinema department was then a hotbed of avant-garde activity. Experimental filmmakers Ken Jacobs and Larry Gottheim taught there, while Peter Kubelka, Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage passed through its corridors. Halpern immersed herself in the experimental film scene there but left after six months to make her own work. Sustaining herself as a typist while making films at night, Halpern started working on 8mm but soon moved to 16mm, which became her preferred format.
Like many avant-garde artists living in Los Angeles, Halpern wound up working in the Hollywood industry, though she often found herself the only woman on a lighting or camera crew. Spanning commercial and artist’s film, Halpern was a cinematographer or gaffer on mainstream features, including Godzilla 1985 (1985) and Alien: Resurrection (1997), alongside music videos, commercials and documentaries.
Committed to anti-racist filmmaking, while at UCLA Halpern worked on films by directors associated with the LA Rebellion, including Charles Burnett, Barbara McCullough and Julie Dash. Dash, who Halpern assisted on her 1981 short Illusion, tweeted after her death that: “At UCLA she was truly a member of the LA Rebellion.”
Halpern had a lifelong fascination with the movement and substance of light, and multimedia collaborations opened a new path in her art practice. Between 1971 and 1973, she was involved in Ken and Flo Jacobs’ paracinematic 3D shadow-play company, the New York Apparition Theatre, manipulating shadows and coloured light. From 2015, she worked with Single Wing Turquoise Bird, the legendary West Coast psychedelic light show, which her husband David Lebrun helped establish. Lebrun and Halpern often worked together; they set up the film production company Night Fire Films to produce documentary features and animated projects, including Lebrun’s Breaking the Maya Code (2008).
A passionate programmer of experimental film, Halpern was actively involved in the Collective for Living Cinema, helping to keep the artist-run organisation operating for more than two decades. She was also a founding member of the artist-run screening organisation, the Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis, which ran from 1976 to 1981. “Basically,” Halpern observed, “as at the Collective, we were a group of desperate filmmakers who needed to see work.”
Halpern had only recently started receiving international recognition for her extraordinary body of work. At an artist retrospective at the International Peripheral Film Festival in A Coruña in 2022, she premiered a suite of 13 shorts, many of them fresh out of the lab and brought in a suitcase from LA.
- Amy Halpern, 2 April 1953 to 15 August 2022
