Maureen Selwood: Animating the Interior

In person: Maureen Selwood.

In person: Maureen Selwood.

Over her wide-ranging career as a visual artist working in installation, performance, and particularly animation, Maureen Selwood has created a pioneering body of work that is vividly evocative and marked by a tender and intimate poetry. Often focusing on stories, memories, and dreams that reframe and foreground women’s subjectivity and experience, Selwood’s animated films employ multiple techniques and textures to showcase her highly lyrical and unmistakably personal approach to line, color, and movement. Surrealist moments of surprise and humor combine with themes of loss, grief, resistance, and empowerment, resulting in a memorable cinematic sensibility that is deeply empathetic as it externalizes complex emotions and consciousness with great awareness and beauty.

The Academy Film Archive has been home to Selwood’s collection since 2016, and this program features restorations of several of her 16mm and 35mm films, in addition to a selection of digital work.

Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano.

All films directed by Maureen Selwood. All films courtesy of Maureen Selwood and the Academy Film Archive.

Total program runtime: 65 min.

As You Desire Me
2009. 10 min. USA. Color. Digital.

Flying Circus: An Imagined Memoir
1995. 11 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive.

Hail Mary
1998. 3 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive.

A Modern Convenience
2012. 6 min. USA. Color. Digital.

Drawing Lessons
2005. 6 min. USA. Color. English. Digital.

Blue Poodle Chair
2022. 2 min. USA. Color. English. Digital.

Pearls
1990. 1 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive.

This is Just to Say
1987. 4 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. New print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

The Rug
1985. 10 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive.

Odalisque
1980. 12 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive.

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.

Theater accessibility accommodations available upon request. Learn more about our accessibility initiatives.

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