MADELINE SCHWARTZMAN (writer, producer, director, editor) is a New York artist who has been making films since 1990. Prior to APHRODISIAC, which marks her feature debut, she completed five prize-winning shorts that have screened at festivals both here and abroad.

Schwartzman earned a Masters degree from the Yale School of Architecture in 1986 and has since pursued an interdisciplinary career which encompasses film, architecture and sculpture. She teaches architectural design at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design, and spends the academic year researching, writing and completing the films which she produces in the summer months with the help of former students. Schwartzman has received grants in various disciplines, including a residency in architecture at the American Academy in Rome (1988), an Artist's Grant in Sculpture from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1989), a Film Production grant from the New School for Social Research (1993), and a sabbatical grant from Parsons (1997) for post-production on APHRODISIAC.

In 1993 Schwartzman began a trilogy of intellectual comic adventures which prefigure APHRODISIAC. Shot in 16mm on location at Columbia University, the films are meditations on sex, religion and technology.

SOMA-SEMA (1993, 21 minutes) stars the internationally acclaimed cabaret singer Ann Hampton Callaway, as a modern day Orpheus. Set in the observatories and labs of the physics building, Ms. Callaway makes a stunning singing descent to Hades, a room eternally projecting the failures of modern science.

THE BEGAT (1994, 15 minutes) updates the love triangle between Adam, Eve and Adam's first wife Lilith. A classroom showdown reveals how things might have turned if the demonized Lilith, and not Eve, had been written into the religious canon.


DIAL P FOR PAGAN (1995, 15 minutes) observes the absurd rituals of a group of tenured male professors who maintain an underground, ancient roman religious cult. Hoping to increase their flagging popularity on campus, they perform a bizarre spell which misfires and sends them on a transformational journey.


Following suit, APHRODISIAC sets New Yorkers on a search for Jesus' foreskin, the 'holy grail' of aphrodisiacs. The film is Schwartzman's most ambitious project to date. She is currently writing a new screenplay. Schwartzman was born in NYC where she continues to live and work.

FILMOGRAPHY

APHRODISIAC 1998 93 minutes
DIAL P FOR PAGAN 1995 15 minutes
THE BEGAT 1994 15 minutes
SOMA-SEMA 1993 21 minutes
DIVIDED EYE 1992 6 minutes
HAIRPIECE 1991 3 minutes
HOLYLAND 1990+

 

Photos: Jeff Miles

© 1997 Ascending Pictures, all rights reserved.