| Description | The records of the Jo Ann Kaplan Archive encompass nearly the entire span of the filmmaker’s life, from her childhood colouring books to her last artistic projects in the early 2010s.
The largest section of the archive consists of records relating to her film and television projects. These contain material from all stages of the craft, including initial drafts of scripts, research materials, correspondence, proposals and pitches to production companies, scene breakdowns and shot lists, props, and VHS and cassette tape masters of video and audio. These begin with her master’s thesis film Dracula: A Family Romance (1971) and cover all notable works up to her death in 2016. Filmmaking projects which never made it past the drawing board are also represented here. Her most extensively documented works are further split into three subsections – Development & Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Production & Distribution.
The remainder of the collection comprises a wide range of formats and subjects: her other artistic outputs in various formats including canvas paintings, sketchbooks, and photography in a breadth of subjects and mediums; in-depth research and influences for this output, drawn from exhibitions, performances, events, and clippings from newspapers, magazines, and other published works; the papers of her personal life which include notebooks, diaries, personal administration, documents relating to travel and immigration, and files relating to family life; and an extensive collection of correspondence ranging across 40 years from 1970 to 2010, most notably with Chris ???, a close friend of hers from her time in Paris, and Wayne Lavender, a friend from New York. |
| Individual or organisational biography | Jo Ann Kaplan (1945-2016) was a filmmaker, editor, painter, and teacher, born in New York on ???. She was raised by her mother, the artist Charlotte Klose, after her father Louis Kaplan left the family when she was 10.
Kaplan started her artistic career as a painter, studying at Hunter College of the City University of New York in the 1960s. She then transitioned into film, beginning with Dracula: A Family Romance in 1971, which was created to accompany her thesis for her MA in Fine Art at Hunter College. Following completion of her MA, she moved to Paris before settling in East London in the early 1970s, living in Wapping and working for an animation studio, which became another key skillset used in her filmmaking work. During this period, she worked on some early personal film projects including Our Lady of the Angels and Two-Shot, both in 1978.
She then started to find editing work in the British independent film industry, doing sound editing during the early 1980s for films such as Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts (1985). Editing work slowly became her key source of income and would remain so for much of her career, affording her the financial security to work on other personal artistic projects.
It was following this period, starting with her 1986 documentary Invocation: Maya Deren on the eponymous experimental filmmaker known for the seminal short Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), that her career as a director took off. That same year, she married Harry Bromley Davenport and left Wapping. Unfortunately, the marriage only lasted two years before their separation in 1988.
Following Invocation, she was prolific in her creative production: writing, directing, editing and promoting a body of work which ranged from documentaries to experimental fantasy works incorporating recurring themes including the experience of womanhood and the female form, myths & legends, and metatheatrical deconstructions of what it means to be an artist. Her films often contained queer elements and were shown at queer festivals such as the New York Lesbian & Gay Festival.
It was during the late 1990s that some of her most notable works were produced. The Holy Family Album (1995) was a controversial Channel 4 documentary written and narrated by Angela Carter, a frequent collaborator of Kaplan’s, which imagined representations of Christ in Western art as if they were photographs in a holy family photo album. The Story of I (1997) was an experimental sensuous work shot in Kaplan’s own home, with a woman sitting naked in a bath reading Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, leading to surreal fantasies and explicit imagery. Finally, An Anatomy of Melancholy (2000) is a rumination on life, as we hear a young child reading Keats’ Ode on Melancholy while viewing anatomical and botanical artwork.
At the turn of the millennium, her creative output began to slow down as she found yet another vocation in education, teaching MA Animation and Editing at the National Film and Television School from 2000, and MA Documentary at Goldsmiths from 2006, alongside lecturing at a range of other academic institutions.
Her final film, Watching Paint Dry, began in 2007 following Kaplan’s diagnosis of emphysema as an introspective examination of the consequences of her own mortality, using timelapses of watercolour self-portraits to highlight her aging features. The work is posthumously dated 2010, but was an ongoing project which she worked on until her passing.
Kaplan died in May 2016 in the UK. Obituary published 4 May so very early in May, but no exact date. |