Marjorie Keller
1950-1994
Marjorie Keller (b. 1950; Yorktown, NY. d. 1994) was an influential filmmaker, author, activist, and scholar. After being expelled from Tufts University for participating in a protest, Keller finished her undergraduate coursework at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. She later went on to pursue a master’s degree and then a doctorate in Cinema Studies at New York University. Keller taught filmmaking and film history at several institutions and was a professor the University of Rhode Island until her death in 1994. Keller began exhibiting films in 1969, creating more than twenty-five films during her lifetime. Among her best-known works are “Misconception” (1977), “Daughters of Chaos” (1980) and “Herein” (1992). Like many filmmakers of the American avant-garde, as well as the earliest documentary filmmakers of the feminist conscious-raising movement of the 1960s, Keller used the raw material of her life for both the images and themes of her films. Misconception, her longest film, documents the birth of her niece, using the small format of home movies, jagged editing and synchronized sound to express the pain and joy of the event, and the chasm between experience and memory.…
Films