MARTHA COLBURN

False beliefs

To discover her in the last L’Alternativa Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona 2010 was really stimulating for all the cinema lovers. Martha Colburn’s fascinating Triumph of the wild (2010) was awarded exaequo as the best short film. It’s an intense animation collage about American history in which a landscape full of beasts is the frame of human life drawing a source of contradictions between prey and hunter, civilized and wild, horror and idealism, each one as faces of the same reality.

Martha Colburn was born in Gettysburg and she studied at the College of Art of Baltimore. After that, she studied at the Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie and she began to explore the creative possibilities of 8 and 16 mm filming in combination with existent material in order to recreate it and complement it around collages with a strong aesthetics and a deep content always resulting in a vibrating rhythm and handmade air films.

Myth labs (2008) was showed at the same festival in the 2009 edition. “This is a film about fear, paranoia, faith and loss of faith and salvation. ‘Myth labs’ takes place in the American frontier and wilderness. Similarly to Meth addicts in rural America, for the Puritans the wilderness represented a place of their damnation and their ultimate resurrection synonymously. Through blending these two times in American history, I attempt to illuminate the idea that the lure of this drug for contemporary rural inhabitants is rooted in our earliest consciousness-forming experiences as settlers in a state of spiritual and physical emergency. Overly fervent faith and addiction alike, can change one from mere mortal to Superman to scarecrow. Just as a ‘wolf in sheeps clothing’ these two vices (or devices) of salvation can have devastating consequences.” Religion as the sheep’s skill that hides the wolf inside us, faith as an excuse for destroying the other in the fight for power and imposing superstitions and dogmas as a rule of control.

Visually her films are always rich in nuances, colours and textures. As a handmade work, it’s experienced as less artificial than the actual digital animation that dominates the market always looking for an excessively cold perfection. In Martha Colburn’s films one can perceive her creative pulse beat and a convulse soul full of questions that surface in frenetic rhythms and all the music she uses as a soundtrack. In her works art breaths, trembles with emotion, doubts, lives.

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Video and shots by Martha Colburn