Publicist and designer at the Harvard Film Archive since 2010, Brittany Gravely is also an experimental 16mm filmmaker and visual artist. The films in the HFA collection include earlier works which she wrote, directed, edited and sound-designed, such as her School of the Museum of Fine Arts thesis film from 2001, Introduction to Living in a Closed System—which considers the visions of technology and nature working together in utopian/dystopian futures—and her ecological "horror" film Blood of the Earthworm (2006).
In addition to occasionally creating non-photochemical pieces like a PowerPoint presentation on the film American Psycho, she spent several years making ephemeral work in expanded cinema projects. First, as half of the collaborative Architecture of the Sun with artist Jennifer Pipp accompanying live music while manipulating dual 16mm projections in clubs, theaters and galleries. More recently, she and artist/musician Ken Linehan have been experimenting with psychic and chance operations in the expanded film project Magical Approach. The pieces that emerged from their initially open-ended collaboration include Telekinesis Lesson 6 (2018), Prologue to the Tarot: Glenna (2018), Willa (2018) and First Hypnotic Suggestion (2020).
As a founding member of the Boston-area film collective AgX, Gravely has also made a series of hand-processed black-and-white films using their artist-run lab: Astrology (2018) and Story of the Dreaming Water – Chapters One (2018) and Two (2019). In 2017, she also contributed a film installation to AgX members' collaboration with experimental sound musicians for a live event at the Waterworks Museum in Chestnut Hill, MA.
Her films have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, CROSSROADS, Images Film Festival, Antimatter, New York Underground, Chicago Underground, Fracto in Berlin, and many others, as well as venues such as the ICA Boston, Brattle Theatre, Coolidge Corner Theatre, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, RISD Museum, MIT, Pacific Film Archive, Mono No Aware in New York, Estudios Churobusco in Mexico City and Kino Palais in Buenos Aires.
Gravely also occasionally curates shorts programs. In 2011 she curated shows for Star Pupils—featuring highlights of recent films from students attending Boston colleges; she and other artists programmed the nomadic Boston screening series Cinematic Disobedience in 2012 - 2013; and more recently she put shorts programs together for the Sleeping Giant Film Festival in Jacksonville, FL, including "Learning to Be Human: The Open-Ended Educational Film."
About the Collection
The collection contains all the original and pre-print materials for the 16mm films along with outtakes. Elements for newer films are still being processed.
The films are catlogued in HOLLIS.
