SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.
Narrated by Laurie Anderson, the film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.
Written and Directed by Lisa Rovner
Released in 2021 with Modern Films in the UK and Metrograph Pictures in the US.
The Guardian gave it 5 stars, NYtimes called it "Bewitching", LAtimes "Fascinating" and the Wall Street Journal "Hallucinogenic".
“What makes Rovner’s film isn’t just the routinely gobsmacking scholarship at its heart, but also the director’s incredible ability to manifest, in her filmmaking, the same experimental energy found in the music she focuses on. Typically fodder for filmmakers to simply dump Wikipedia pages on viewers, Rovner’s film is startlingly original, expertly using archival footage as less an information dump and more a portrait of revolution that feels strangely timeless. Sound and image mesh throughout this film in a way that feels thrillingly cinematic, a dream-like recounting of the lives and works of some of modern music’s most important foremothers. It also helps that the film is narrated by one of their descendants, Laurie Anderson. Anderson’s narration is entrancing, and perfectly in step with a film that’s less interested in the mechanical and more the almost spiritually experiential.” - Criterion Cast.
www.sisterswithtransistors.com
Produced by Anna Lena Films in association with Willow Glen Films.
BFI Lottery Funded.