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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) is centred on her speaking voice and fast editing of handheld camera. The reading of James Joyce’s end section of Ulysses is opened and closed with 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 licensed compositions by Diamanda Galas in “Now I am yours” (1992). She combined non verbal vocalisation and spoken word in the soundtracks of 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 (2018).
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 associated with apparitional events of the Virgin Mary.. The soundtrack is composed of voices sobbing, wailing, lamenting, crying and in soaring pitches to create a soundscape of elation and terror. Temenos has been published on DVD by the BFI Histories of the Avant-garde series and the soundtrack is available on CD. Temenos is filmed on 35mm which creates a presence of the image in cinema 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 image in cinema 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) filmed on 35mm using classical Hollywood studio lighting. Communion initiated a socially, as well as spiritually framed portraits of women in religious community and as individuals. The films’ use of duration foregrounds the presence of the camera and the off screen, diegetic sound and place. Jennifer (2015) is feature length portrait made with Jennifer del Corazón de Jesus who is an enclosed Discalced Carmelite nun. It was self-filmed by Jennifer in the enclosed monastery in Ronda, Spain. The multi-media, multi-part work Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara (2015-18) was made with the enclosed community of sisters in the monastery of Santa Chiara in San Marino, Italy. It comprises a 16mm film, a 6-channel audio, a video of interviews and an essay in an accompanying publication. It has been shown in cinema screenings and in installations. Jennifer and Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara combine feminist approaches to film portrait and documentary of women in holy community and living in devotional space.
Her next feature film “I Die of Sadness Crying For You” (2019) encompasses the strand of her work on her musical influences. This film stems from a long period of research where she rebuilt her acoustic memory network of popular songs creating a ‘cancionero’ (a collection of songs) from this memory including Latin American popular genres such as boleros and the powerful genre from Spain cola or ‘canción nacional’ and other songs 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 women’s 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.
From 2020 she has added new directions to her work in performance in dance and singing including 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 including James Creed, Gagarin (aka Graham Dowdall), 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. She has created a new genre combining atheist and religious texts, spoken word and sung vocals in the recital XXXI. THE NIGHT-SONG performed live and recorded and released on Bandcamp.
Singing is a communication of profound emotion and an embodied practice of exaltation. She enjoys 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. It is a privileged access to the expression of profound emotion such as sorrow as well as performing a live creative act of surplus production. The popular diva is a figure in “I Die of Sadness Crying For You” is larger than life figure who embodies individual and women’s sorrow. 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. The philosopher 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.
These ideas on the singer and the image as icon are taken into the 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 films which feature film portraits of the singer Nico and newly filmed and composed sound by GAGARIN (Graham Dowdall) including recital of Romantic poetry. MARIA is a feature-length 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 of mapping this region. She has made several pieces in this epic geography 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.
