Description
When It Was Blue (Blu-ray)
Selected Works 1992-2022
Author/Editor: Jennifer Reeves
CONTENTS
RELATED EVENTS: Celebrate the release of When It Was Blue with two special public events featuring Jennifer Reeves! On Wednesday, January 14, 2026 at 7pm, join us at Shapeshifters Cinema for the Blu-ray release celebration Jennifer Reeves: When It Was Blue; followed by an in-person appearance by the filmmaker on Thursday, January 15, 2026 at 7pm at Gray Area for Jennifer Reeves: The Gloria of Your Imagination.
This Blu-ray collection brings together three decades of work by American experimental filmmaker Jennifer Reeves, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary avant-garde cinema. Working primarily in 16mm, Reeves combines hand-painted film, optical printing, layered sound and visceral imagery to explore perception, memory, feminism, mental health, sexuality and the fragile relationship between human beings and the natural world.
Spanning from early short works of the 1990s to recent films completed in 2022, When It Was Blue reveals a cinema rooted in physical gesture and material transformation. Reeves intervenes directly on the filmstrip—painting, corroding emulsions, sewing fragments together—creating images that pulse, fracture and dissolve. These works resist traditional narrative forms, instead inviting viewers into an embodied, sensorial experience where vision itself is questioned and re-formed.
The collection is anchored by the feature-length When It Was Blue (2008), a profoundly moving meditation on nature, loss, and perception, alongside key short works such as Girls Daydream About Hollywood, Fear of Blushing, We Are Going Home, Landfill 16, and Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome. Together, they chart an artistic journey that is both intimate and formally radical. Presented on Blu-ray with a substantial bilingual booklet featuring essays by Laura Staab and Michael Sicinski, this edition is an essential release for collectors, scholars and lovers of experimental film.
One could say that the very fragility of film, once again unusual in the face of the dematerialization of electronic images, encourages contemplation of change and chance, of birth and death. Such notions find an eminently physical expression in Reeves’s work: in the fractal cracks of altered pigments that adorn some of his hand-assembled photograms, or in the undulating flows of thick, opalescent paint, sometimes studded with air bubbles like stars, that surge forth at other times. (Ed Halter, Artforum)
On a structural level, Reeves has occupied a bold position by pushing back the boundary between reason, obsessive memories, intimate madness and the drift of society; at the intersection of psychic disturbances, cultural artifacts and the process of the darkening and dilation of vision and consciousness, achieved through the accumulation of layers of images on a single strip of film. (Bérénice Reynaud, Senses of Cinema)
CONTENTS:
When It Was Blue (2008) 58 minutes
Girls Daydream About Hollywood (1992) 4 minutes
Configuration 20 (1994) 11 minutes
The Girl’s Nervy (1995) 5 minutes
We Are Going Home (1998) 10 minutes
Fear of Blushing (2001) 5 minutes
Landfill 16 (2011) 9 minutes
Strawberries in the Summertime (2013) 16 minutes
Color Neutral (2014) 3 minutes
Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome (2022) 6 minutes
Published by: Re:Voir
Format: Blu-ray, Region-free
Original Format: 16mm
Total Running Time: 127 minutes
Language: English
Subtitles: French
Booklet: 40 pages (English / French)
Director: Jennifer Reeves
Years: 1992–2022
Release date: December 8, 2025