about
Short Bio:
Holly Fisher has been active since the mid-sixties as an independent filmmaker, printmaker, teacher, and film editor. She was the editor of Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s feature documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?. This film about a racially motivated Detroit murder case of 1982 was nominated for an Oscar in 1989.
Her experimental short works and long-form essay films –– explorations in time,memory, trauma, and perception –– have been screened in museums and film festivals worldwide including Whitney Museum Biennials; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Film Forum, Japan; and two world premieres in The Forum of the Berlinale, Germany. She has received multiple grants from The Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, CAPS, and The American Film Institute, among others. Her silent film Rushlight won the Grand Prize in the 1985 Black Maria Film Festival, and her feature Bullets for Breakfast received “Best Experimental Film Award” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1992. Her solo retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art(1995) and more recently The Anthology Film Archives (2019), were both entitled THE FILMS OF HOLLY FISHER.
Fisher completed two new works during the past year of Coronavirus Lockdown, one long-form and one short; Softshoe for Bartok (23 minutes) will be premiered at The Brooklyn Film Festival held in early June 2021; her two feature works Out of the Blue (2021) and Deafening Silence (2012) concerning Burma under dictatorship, will be available for free streaming, by The Anthology Film Archives,June 16 – 29. The AFA will also sponsor multiple in-house screenings of Out of the Blue and her feature documentary A Question of Sunlight over the weekend of 9/11. The event has added intrigue since the two films variously frame the creative response of each of us involved –– New York avant-garde composer for both works Lois V Vierk; NY Downtown artist/protagonist José Urbach featured in A Question of Sunlight; and filmmaker Holly Fisher –– because each of us witnessed first hand from our own windows, the attack on the World Trade Towers twenty years ago, Sept 11, 2001.
Long Bio:
Holly Fisher received a B.A. in Asian Art History at Columbia University in 1964, and a M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University in 1982. She lives and works in Tribeca, New York City.
Fisher has been active since the mid-sixties as an independent filmmaker, printmaker, teacher, and film editor, including Oscar nominated documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?. Her experimental short works and long-form essay films are explorations in time, memory, trauma and perception. They have been screened in museums and film festivals worldwide including Whitney Museum Biennials; The Tribeca Film Festival; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Film Forum, Japan; and two world premieres in The Forum of the Berlinale, Germany. She has received multiple grants from The Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, CAPS, and The American Film Institute, among others. Her silent film Rushlight won the Grand Prize in the 1985 Black Maria Film Festival, and her feature Bullets for Breakfast received “Best Experimental Film Award” at the 1992 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her solo retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art (1995) and more recently The Anthology Film Archives (2019), were both entitled THE FILMS OF HOLLY FISHER.
In the past few years Fisher has made works from film and amateur iPhone sources, looped for gallery and storefront installation, as well as for exhibition in conjunction with her ongoing archival digital print projects. To date, her art gallery shows, each featuring a mix of film projection, archival prints and installation works include POWER/PLAY, Augusta Savage Gallery, UMass Amherst; OFF THE SCREEN! ON THE STREET, @ THE 55TH Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2017; and FILM/STILLS, The Film Gallery, Paris, France, 2019.
Her new bio-hybrid feature project OUT OF THE BLUE was completed summer 2020 while under Coronavirus quarantine. This project is a long-form experimental essay, structured within a series of cloud video studies filmed with an iPhone on a flight between Berlin and New York. BLUE is intended for independent release, but is also to be a companion piece integrated within Fisher’s work-in-progress Thin/Ice, a long-term on-going project that began as a daily filming practice in a small pond behind the refurbished mill in Western MA where she living at the time. Both projects will include resonant imagery pulled from Fisher’s video diary, edited within the semi-static yet time-based imagery of clouds, pond, and seasonal change. Thin/Ice will invite audience participation within a mosaic format linking issues of (family) suicide and global warming; it will be Fisher’s first large-scale installation project and is scheduled for completion by 2022 at the earliest.
• • •
Otherwise Pictures LLC is Holly Fisher’s production company. Formed in 2006, it is an umbrella for multiple productions from then to present. These include long-form personal and collaborative works, personal experimental films and production of digital print series for gallery exhibition.
Titles produced by Otherwise Pictures include: Everywhere at Once (2010); A Question of Sunlight (2014); experimental short videos Trio en Rose (2014), Ruffled Feathers (2016), Goldfish Variations (2012) and t h i n k t a n k (2014); and Ghostdance for a New Century (2015), which premiered at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn with a live performance by the composer and cellist Ha-Yang Kim.
Fisher/Slezas Films Inc. (1965-1971) was a production company formed in 1965 by Holly Fisher and filmmaker Romas V. Slezas. A cinema-verite’ production team formed during the making of their first award-winning film Progress, Pork-Barrel, and Pheasant Feathers, Fisher and Slezas covered all aspects of production, learning as they went along. Slezas did camera, Fisher was sound-recordist, Slezas kept the books, Fisher managed production, interviews, etc. Editing was shared mutually. Other projects included their seminal documentary Watermen (recently restored by Film Restoration), projects for Volkswagen of America, and a pair of documentaries with BF Skinner.
