Marasmus

In collaboration with Laura Ewig .

A womans response to technology/the jet-lag of birth. – B.B .

Although the title refers to a condition of acute malnutrition in which a child is unable to assimilate food, the film is a robust and sumptuous offering. This is no rough edged, craft resistant effort. Rather it is infused with a seductive glamour , – Janis Crystal Lipzin , Artweek .

If there are certain iconic images that represent the obscure history of the American avant-garde cinema, one of them has to be from Marasmus (1981), the extraordinary experimental film by Betzy Bromberg and Laura Ewig . The image is of a woman’s face pressed flat, white and distorted against glass, two hands splayed on each side. She could be pushing against an invisible boundary, or easing through a clear membrane as if being born; either way, the image exemplifies L.A.-based Bromberg’s uncanny ability for uniting a philosophical perspective and an almost mythically emotional sensitivity. Like some of the best feminist experimental work of the 1980s and ‘90s, Bromberg’s films invariably reverberate in this space in between, refusing both the cheerless material analysis of one strand of experimental production and the politically disengaged poetic investigation advocated in other camps of the avant-garde . Instead, her films play on multiple levels, merging politics and poetry, and reveling in the resultant tensions. With Marasmus , Bromberg merges strange and abject images of confinement and escape with a coldly technological environment, and she pits the desire for continuity and coherence against the pure pleasure of drifting through images…Bromberg’s work has plenty to teach us about formal experimentation and the magic of juxtaposition. – Holly Willis, L.A . Weekly