Nina Danino was born in Gibraltar and came to London to study Fine Art in the 70s. Her films have been shown worldwide in film festivals including Edinburgh (1985), London (1992, 1998), Chicago (1994), Ann Arbor, US (2016), in cinemas; Pacific Film Archives, San Francisco (1994), NFT (2011, 2023), ICA, London (2016), Anthology Film Archives, New York (2017), Tate Modern (2016) and recently at the London Film Festival (2019), Seville European Film Festival (2019).
She has taught at Sheffield Hallam University, Architectural Association School of Architecture and since 2000 at Goldsmiths, University of London. She studied Painting at St. Martin’s School of Art (1973-1977) and at Environmental Media, Royal College of Art (1979-81) London where she made the multimedia work First Memory (1980-81) using slide/tape, S8 and 16mm film and her voice to narrate. She developed her practice in experimental film as a member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative 1981-1992. She was also a member of the editorial collective of the journal Undercut 1981-1990 which published on experimental and artists’ film and video and is Co-Editor of The Undercut Reader (2002).
Her interests have centred on experimental film, theory of structural/materialist film, notions of subjective inscription and the ‘feminine’ and jouissance, the voice and the film soundtrack in relation to the image. She engaged with psychoanalysis through the writings of Kristeva and Lacan which inform her notions of the ‘feminine’.
Nina Danino’s seminal short film Stabat Mater (1990) used her speaking voice and fast editing, a reading of James Joyce’s end section of Ulysses and a saeta – a religious song which evokes intense and strong emotion. With Stabat Mater (1990) she added the impact of Catholic aesthetics, religious motifs and discourse to experimental film.
She then made “Now I am yours” (1992) which has been exhibited internationally. This film is centred on the writings of the mystic St. Teresa of Avila. Visually it features Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome, mixed with footage on S8, VHS, 35mm and Hi 8 formats where these parts all come together in one whole in a highly performative drama of ecstasy. During the 90s she collaborated with singers Shelley Hirsch, Sainkho Namtchylak commissioning original vocal compositions and including published songs by Diamanda Galas in “Now I am yours” (1992). She combined non verbal vocals and spoken word in the soundtracks to these films. These two films and The Silence is Baroque (1997) are published in the DVD Rupture/Rapture/Jouissance – The Religious Trilogy published by LUX (2028).
In 1997 she made the landscape film Temenos (1998) with a soundtrack by Sainkho Namtchylak with additional parts by Shelley Hirsch and mezzo soprano Catherine Bott. Temenos is filmed on locations in Europe in places imbued with attributed apparitional events of the Virgin Mary. On a phenomenological plane it engaged with the presence of the image in cinema. The soundtrack is composed of voices sobbing, wailing, lamenting, crying and in soaring pitches to create a sound landscape of joy and terror. Temenos has been published on DVD by the BFI Avant-garde series and the soundtrack is available on CD. Temenos is filmed on 35mm which with the soundtrack, creates a haunting Other worldly place.
Theological and phenomenological film theory informs a strand of her work on the presence of the cinema image which has a meditative or even a contemplative potential. This underpins her fourth feature film Solitude (2022) as well as Temenos and Communion (2010) which is a short silent film photographed by Billy Williams OBE (The Exorcist 1973) on 35mm using classical Hollywood studio lighting. Communion has been shown in solo film installations. With Communion she initiated a socially, as well as spiritually framed film portraits of women in religious community and as individuals. The films use duration and foreground the presence of the camera and composition. Jennifer (2015) is feature length collaborative portrait with Jennifer del Corazón de Jesus who is an enclosed Discalced Carmelite nun. It was self-filmed in the enclosed monastery in Ronda, Spain. The multi-media, multi-part work Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara (2015-18) was made in collaboration with the enclosed community of sisters in the monastery of Santa Chiara in San Marino, Italy. It includes a 16mm film, a 6-channel audio, a video of interviews and an essay in an accompanying publication. It has been shown in solo and duo installations. Jennifer and Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara combine structural film with feminist approaches to self representation by women within institutional and individual devotional space.
Her next film “I Die of Sadness Crying For You” (2019) encompasses the strand of her work on her musical influences and song. This film stems from a long period of research where she rebuilt her acoustic memory network of popular music including Latin American lyrical genres such as boleros and a powerful genre from Spain which she set out to map up to the 70s. This research is also recorded in a 3 hour conversation with her mother who supplements the knowledge and memory. The film “I Die of Sadness Crying For You” centres on songs of unrequited love and sadness called copla. Amassing a wealth of materials for further works on this topic, the film is a synthesis of this research in a personal essay film which is a reclamation of copla as a lyrical form from the perspective of women’s experiences of love, rejection and social marginalisation. “I Die of Sadness Cry For You “ (2019) was shown at the London International Film Festival and at Seville European Film Festival.
Her recent performances are I’m Dying (Yoko Ono), Religion & Art Live (2023). Killing What’s Inside of You (2021), Let it Roll (2021), Ghost of Love (2021), When the Music’s Over (2021) which are live and recorded to camera. They address the female gaze and the concept of ‘feminine’ jouissance as an ecstatic experience of enjoyment for the private self. The short videos Nocturn (2020), Sweet Child (2021) bring rock covers and songs into her creative art practice. Since 2020 she has collaborated with musicians James Creed, Gagarin, Donna Matthews. She sung the songs of Nico for the soundtrack to her film Solitude (2022). She is developing a Hildegard of Bingen project based on the composer and mystic. She has released an album of spoken word and vocals from biblical sources I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty TESTAMENT which is dark and apocalyptic in tone.
Singing is a communication of profound emotion and an embodied practice of exaltation. Thus, she considers the voice and the performance of singing as an embodied performance of jouissance which in psychoanalysis touches the Real beyond the Symbolic and also captures impulses bordering on ecstatic experience. The woman singer in “I Die of Sadness Crying For You” is presented as a larger than life figure with privileged access to the expression of profound emotion such as sorrow as well as performing a live creative act of surplus production. Her current projects explore singing in these terms as itself as a ‘feminine’ production and in relation to film as a practice of self-inscription into her own films. Nietzsche proposes the avant-garde artist as a model of self-rejuvenation, self-transmutation, self-transfiguration of self and audience and in which the artist is in a kind of habitual intoxication.
She has completed a diptych of two feature-length films based on opera and avant-garde Gothic rock through two iconic singers Maria Callas (1923-1977) and Nico (Christa Paffgen) (1938-1988) and the contralto and operatic voice and their associations with darkness and with transcendence.
Her feature-length film Solitude (2022) is composed of an assembly from four underground-experimental films which feature the singer Nico and newly filmed and composed sound by GAGARIN (Graham Dowdall) including the recital of Romantic poetry. MARIA is a feature-length experimental film on the opera singer Maria Callas as an icon and women. The film uses experimental film techniques to transfigure Maria Callas in a series of panels which are like the Iconostasis of the Orthodox Church.
Since Close to Home (1982-85), a strand of Nina Danino’s work returns to a geographic and cultural memory of the Mediterranean in the south of Spain and Gibraltar where she was born. It features the epic geogeography of the Straits, views, and the geo-cosmology of a region which is filtered through literature, scripts, photographs, cinema films, music; Stabat Mater responds to this impulse. She has made several pieces including the mixed media installation Meteorologies (2013, 2018) which includes artists’ book, audio, videos, film and writing as intersubjective maps of this region. She is developing a Trilogy which includes a feature film in this strand of her work under the title The Far South with dialogue and actors.
Her films are in the collection of the British Film Institute National Film Archive. Visionary Landscapes is an illustrated monograph published by Black Dog Publishing (2005).
She is Reader in Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives and works in London.
