Today is Sunday - Jean Sousa
Sunday, Oct. 19th · 2:00 PM

RPM Festival and the Brattle theatre co-present a special screening of works by Jean Sousa, a visionary Chicago-based artist whose experimental films and photographic work have left a lasting mark on the contemporary art landscape. Working across media for over four decades, Sousa brings a deeply personal and poetic sensibility to her practice, exploring memory, perception, and the language of images.

Her work has been exhibited and screened widely, from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and international venues in London, Paris, and Rome. A two-time recipient of Artist Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and a Regional Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sousa has also been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome and held residencies across the U.S. and Europe.

The program, Today is Sunday, spans nine films, from her early 1977 piece Summer Medley to her recent film-poem series, Losing Battle, —offering an evocative journey through Sousa’s evolving experimental voice and visual language.

Post Screening Q&A
with Doug Urbank and Jean Sousa

Douglas Urbank, based in Boston, Massachusetts, is an artist with a background in sculpture and drawing who began to experiment with filmmaking in 2008. His short films have screened in festivals and curated programs, including nationally at Revolutions Per Minute Festival, Boston, Massachusetts; Microscope Gallery and Millennium Film Workshop in New York; San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Film Festival; Moviate Underground Film Festival, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Seattle, Washington; and internationally at Mire Lab’s PRISME festival, Nantes, France; and curated programs including, Zumzeig Cinema, Barcelona; Laboratorio Experimental de Cine program, Mexico City; Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne, Australia; and others. He was a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships Film & Video finalist in both 2017 and 2019.

Beginning in 2001 he co-hosted a radio program devoted to experimental, improvisational, and other unconventional music and sound art. He has been a member of Fort Point Theatre Channel, an independent theater company which brings together an ensemble of artists from the worlds of theater, music, and visual arts. And he is a founding member of the AgX Film Collective. He is interested in cross-pollination between art forms on the fringes of alternative culture: experimental music, film and theater.

still: What Am I Doing Here

Summer Medley
16mm Sound 5 min. 1977

What Am I Doing Here
16mm Silent 13 min. 1978

The Circus
16mm Sound 6 min. 1977

Spent Moments
16mm Silent 10 min. 1984

Swish
16mm Silent 2 min. 1982

Today is Sunday
16mm Sound 18 min. 1987

16mm prints from Canyon Cinema


Jane
Remastered 16mm to digital Sound 3 min. 1977/2025

The Mermaid
Remastered 16mm to digital Sound 8 min. 2020

Losing Battle
Digital Sound 5 min. 2019

Total: 70 mins

Boston-born and Chicago-based artist Jean Sousa was a performance artist and studied dance at the Boston Conservatory. She moved to Chicago in 1974 and became the first graduate student in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With access to the Film Department resources and film history classes with Stan Brakhage, her interest shifted toward making films. She continued to use performance in her films and frequently performed for the camera.

Sousa has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and a Regional Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2014 and 2017. Awards include a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Cliff Dwellers Fellowship for Artist Residency at Ragdale, a Professional Artist in Residence at Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan, and an Artist Residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and subsequently taught at SAIC, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the MIT Summer Institute for Film, Photography, and Video.

Sousa works primarily in experimental film and photography. Her films have been screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York, the National Film Theatre, London, Collectif Jeune Cinéma in Paris, Image Forum Cinematheque, in Tokyo, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Solo screenings include Microscope Gallery and Millennium in New York, London Filmmakers Cooperative, The Funnel in Toronto, Hallwalls in Buffalo, the Cinematheque in San Francisco, Chicago Filmmakers, and The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago among others. Her work has been included in numerous festivals, including the Ambulante International Film Festival in Mexico City and touring, the International Festival of Avant-Garde Film in London, the Festival international de jeune cinema in Paris, the Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, the Big Muddy Film Festival in Illinois, and the Onion City Film Festival in Chicago. Her films are in the Collectif Jeune Cinema in Paris, The Film-Makers’ Coop in New York, and Canyon Cinema Foundation Collection. She was commissioned by the Chicago Film Archive to create a film using their historic collections for their 2020 Media Mixer.

Ms. Sousa was formerly the Trott Family Director of Interpretive Exhibitions and Family Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago. As a museum educator, she curated exhibitions for intergenerational audiences that included interactive media. She served as Chair and panelist at numerous national and international conferences including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the National Gallery of Ireland. She is the author of “Faces, Places, & Inner Spaces,” a book for young readers, co-published by Abrams and the Art Institute of Chicago, and reviewed by the New York Times Book Review.

Summer Medley
16mm Sound 5 min. 1977

An 8mm collection of footage from a summer vacation is layered with a pair of legs dancing to the music of Hamza El Din creating a puzzle where shapes add, subtract, and multiply in a medley of bold colors, horizontal movements, and simplified forms. Inspired by the early tape loop work of Steve Reich, the film is constructed from four out-of-sync film loops that combine and recombine to create variations in imagery and an interplay of patterns and form.
--- Jean Sousa

What Am I Doing Here
16mm Silent 18 min. 1978

What Am I Doing Here was an evolution of a performance piece which involved all the permutations of five words, five notes, and five movements. The film put flesh on the bones of the performance concept, as I went about answering iterations of the question ‘What Am I Doing Here?’ By combining footage from my life, acting out various scenarios, and including documentation from the original performance, I was re-working an idea and creating a semi-narrative out of a formal structure. It was also a transitional piece that represented my moving from performance art to film.
--- Jean Sousa

The Circus
16mm Sound 6 min. 1977

“The Circus” merges my interest in the physical properties of the film medium and performance as a means to reconstruct reality. “The Circus” was originally shot in Regular 8mm at five frames per second, transferred to 16 mm through optical printing, and printed on color negative which accounts for the languorous rhythm of the movement and the film’s brilliant hues.
--- Jean Sousa

Spent Moments
16mm Silent 10 min. 1984

An abstract narrative shot from the point of view of a house – the woman is seen from an angle of the wall, the corner observes her. This is a film about fleeting sensations in the midst of ordinary activities, the energy of heat, and the activity of the imagination.

“ …A mop swishes across an almost holy rectangle of white light, glowing on the kitchen floor. The rectangle leaps out like a projector-lit movie screen in darkness. As images of pen on paper, a woman seated by a typewriter, and games like the word ‘suspense’ followed by a film noir image of shadows and a lamp appear, one infers that Sousa is questioning not only the “spent moments” of the domestic life but of the creative life as well.”
Wendy Brabner, Spiral, 1984

Swish
16mm Silent 2 min. 1982

Swish was made with a moving subject and a moving camera with an open shutter, the result being that each frame is a unique image. It is about the physical properties of the medium and pushing those distinctive features to their limit. The film is an attempt to get inside of motion and can be seen as a modern-day version of Futurist simultaneity. ‘Swish’ is also a camera movement.

Today is Sunday
16mm Sound 18 min 1987

Today is Sunday is both a still life and a landscape film in which the characters are described by nature and their interior spaces. The clouds, the wind, the waves, articulate their presence. A dialogue is established between the external environment, the sound, the weather, and the internal musings of the female character.

“…a lovely black-and-white, elliptical semi narrative by Chicago performance artist Jean Sousa, gravitates around a beachside location and is punctuated by suggestive, free-floating intertitles and isolated bursts of music.”
Chicago Reader, Critic’s Choice, Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Jane
Remastered 16mm to digital Sound 3 min. 1977/2025

Filmed in the woods near Hampshire College while at the MIT Summer Film Institute for Film, Photography & Video. The inspiration for the film was finding a pit in the woods with a rope hanging from a tree, a readymade film set. The title is a reference to both my mother’s name and to Tarzan & Jane, a popular 50’s tv series. The visual effects involved processing the film at rising developer temperatures combined with optical printing.
--- Jean Sousa

The Mermaid
Remastered 16mm to Digital Sound 8 min 2020

The focus of “The Mermaid” is women in 20th century America and the limited options available to them. An excerpt from an Adrienne Rich poem provides a narrative thread to the imagery and invites a feminist interpretation of the action. It is a commentary on beauty as agency in a 'man’s world,' with the arts and entertainment as areas where women were allowed entry, while at the same time raising the question of female identity and available role models that transcend common gender tropes. The performative element and the spectacle of the female body are the driving force of the film, and form the locus of the women’s strength and power, but are also the source of exploitation, limitation, and compromise. This film was commissioned by the Chicago Film Archive for their 2020 Media Mixer.

The Losing Battle
Digital Sound 5 min 2019

The Losing Battle is part of an octet of film poems inspired by my late Aunt Alice Gonçalves Sousa’s poetry. In the poem she uses the metaphor of war for a lover’s quarrel. My intention is to amplify the emotional tone of the words, through repetition and staccato editing of image and sound to convey the physical discomfort of being in an argument without winners, only losers. The source material for the image is an outdoor performance of the Quebec Circus, a comment on the overly dramatic lyrics of the poem, with the final smoke-filled image referencing a battlefield.
--- Jean Sousa