Agitate is group show that spotlights leading voices in contemporary avant-garde film and video – a collection of multidisciplinary artists whose work grapples with and transcends the nihilism at the core of white patriarchy, cinematic expression, and the mediated reality that dominant cultures spawn.
AGITATE ESSENTIAL CINEMA: LEADERS IN AVANT-GARDE FILM + VIDEO
Agitate Essential Cinema Volume 1 screens in-person at Chicago Filmmakers on Saturday, December 18th at 7:00pm!
Agitate Essential Cinema Volume 1 includes the work of Nazlı Dinçel, Karissa Hahn, Sylvia Toy St. Louis, Lynne Sachs, Morrison Gong, Gisela Guzmán, Kelly Gallagher, J.E. Sharpe, Xiaoer Liu, Anu Valia and Sara Suarez. These artists, in concert, express resistance and exuberance in equal measure, each using unique dimensions of cinematic space, ranging from abstract-material to narrative approaches, presenting a collage of phenomenological records of identity and a rebuttal to the term: “Essential Cinema”.
Through this series, we are looking to create a new cinematic cannon that is not defined by white patriarchy but by the vast explorations on space and identity led prominently by those who do not identify as white and male. These are visions inherent to the avant-garde, especially in 2020.
Agitate is an all-inclusive international avant-garde that promotes artists of all types, all genders, and all races. It was founded by Xiaoer Liu, Gisela Guzmán, and M. Woods, but it has no leadership structure, and everyone has an equal voice. Anyone can be a leader in Agitate. This is Agitate’s first traveling screening series. It is a renegotiation of the term “Essential Cinema”.
Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema
In-person screenings are held at Chicago Filmmakers firehouse cinema located at 1326 W Hollywood Ave in the Edgewater neighborhood. Please be sure to arrive 15 minutes prior to showtime and be ready to present your order confirmation number for admission. Proof of full vaccination or a negative Covid-19 PCR test result is required to attend all screenings and events.
★ 12/26 ㊐ One-day limited screening!
Screening starts from 15:00
▼ Films (a total of four works / total of 58 minutes) Bent Time Vever (For Barbara) So Many Ideas Impossible To Do All A month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer)
[Requests and Notices] ★ Please be
sure to wear a mask inside the building.
▶ ︎Online tickets are on sale from 0:00 3 days before to 30 minutes before the screening!
* If the screening schedule is being adjusted, the above may not apply.
▮ Bent Time
USA / 1984/22 minutes
Director / Shoot / Edit: Barbara Hammer
Music: Pauline Oliveros
A work inspired by the remarks of scientists who advocated that light rays bend at the edge of the universe and that time also bends. Along with the meditative original score of electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, the scenery of Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico and the cityscape of Newyork, taken with a 9mm wide-angle lens, feels like time is distorted. Bring.
Ⓒ Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
▮ Vever (For Barbara)
USA / 2019 / English / Color / Digital / 12 minutes
Director / Editing / Sound: Deborah Stratman
Shooting / Voice: Barbara Hammer
Text / Local Recording: Maya Deren Figure
: Sadaji Ito Music: Catherine Bournefeld, Sadaji Ito , George Hardau
Courtesy of: Pythagoras Film
A work created by Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer starting from their respective unfinished projects. A video of Hammer traveling on a motorcycle in Guatemala in 1975 is linked to a story about the rituals in Haiti that Delen met in the 1950s and his experience of failure. Three filmmakers of different generations explore the possibility of replacing the power structure of which they are part.
▮So Many Ideas Impossible To Do All
USA / 2019 / Color / Digital / 11 minutes Director / Edit :: Mark Street
Hammer, who was looking to create a work from the records of the correspondence between Jane Waudening (Brachage) and Barbara Hammer from 1973 to 1985, told the filmmaker Mark Street in 2018 that all the materials and “Jane”· A work produced by taking over the footage of “Brackage” (1974). Draws a complex friendship that connects Wodening and Hummer’s long distance.
▮ A Month Of Single Frames (For Barbara Hammer)
USA / 2019 / English / Color / Digital / 14 minutes Director: Lynne Sachs, Barbara Hammer Photo: Barbara Hammer Editing / Text (on-screen): Lynne Sachs 66th Overhausen Short Film Festival Grand Prix Winner
In 1998, Barbara Hammer kept a diary, recording various sounds and landscapes around him while staying in a seaside hut in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA, where neither electricity nor water was available. This work was created as a process of confronting one’s own death, entrusting all the records created at that time to the filmmaker Lin Sachs. Along with the eyes of observing the quietly buzzing colors and sounds of nature, thoughts about loneliness and aging emerge.
In the words of renowned film avant-gardist Hans Richter, essay films “’make problems, thoughts, and even ideas perceptible … they ‘render visible what is not visible.’” From Chris Marker and Agnes Varda to Travis Wilkerson and Trinh T. Minh-ha, filmmakers and artists have been using the genre of essay filmmaking to explore new modes of blending fact, fiction, and experience to capture essential truths. A constantly evolving and flexible form, essay films are used to document cultural and historical moments, evoke a feeling, unravel an auto-biography, and respond to critical social turning points with a challenging mix of traditional documentary conventions, personal nuance and experimental artistry.
Join UnionDocs and filmmaker Annie Berman to explore the practice of this shape-shifting genre as it stands today. Open to filmmakers, students, artists, scholars, and anyone else interested in the topic, this three-day intensive enables participants to explore new methodologies in crafting their own work in conversation with other makers.
Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of practitioners. Annie will begin the workshop, using as a jumping-off point her film, The Faithful, which will screen as a public, kick-off event the night prior. She will then be joined in conversation by Akosua Adoma Owusu, who will discuss her work in the essay film as it pertains to the construction of historical memory and cultural identity. On the second day, this particular discourse will be expanded by Dónal Foreman (The Image You Missed) and Suneil Sanzgiri (Letter from Your Far-Off Country), both of whom will discuss the sociohistorical, trans-Atlantic, and diasporic aspects of their respective practices. The weekend will then close out with essay film icons Lynn Sachs and Alan Berliner, who will ground participants in their longstanding, essayistic practices and provide food for thought regarding the evolution of the form up until now.
NOTE: This workshop will require in-person participation from all participants. Each participant must present proof of vaccination and a negative COVID test administered within 72 hours of the workshop’s start. Any and all questions, please reach out to grace@uniondocs.org.
https://thefilmstage.com/the-best-documentaries-of-2021/ The state of surveillance, intimate music celebrations, Helen Keller’s socialist ethos, refugee tales, examining the scars of abuse in the Catholic Church, and living a life solely through cinema—just a few of the subjects and stories this year’s documentaries brought us. With 2021 wrapping up, we’ve selected 16 features in the field that left us most impressed.
All Light, Everywhere (Theo Anthony) Attica (Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry) The Beatles: Get Back (Peter Jackson) Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito)Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir)Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs)Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Frank Beauvais)No Ordinary Man (Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt)Procession (Robert Greene)Sabaya (Hogir Hirori)Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Amir “Questlove” Thompson)The Witches of the Orient (Julien Faraut)The Two Sights (Joshua Bonnetta)The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes) The Viewing Booth (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz)
Ela Bittencourt Anne at 13,000 ft Attica Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn Beginning El Planeta Faya Dayi Film About a Father Who France Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. Saint Maud The Power of the Dog The Viewing Booth What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
Mackenzie Lukenbill (Film Comment)
El Planeta
Slow Machine
The Souvenir Part II
Bergman Island
North By Current
Test Pattern
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Film About a Father Who
Undine
The Velvet Underground
Ema
The American Sector
Paris Calligrammes
Chris Shields
Annette
Nina Wu
Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts
About Endlessness
Film About a Father Who
Beginning
Raging Fire
Screen Slate Best Movies of 2021: First Viewings & Discoveries and Individual Ballots
The Inheritance Pig Whirlybird I Blame Society So Late So Soon Annette The Card Counter Film About a Father Who The American Sector Delphine’s Prayers
NELLIE KILLIAN These are my 30 best watches of 2021: new, new to me, and rewatches.
Back Street (Stahl) 1932 Trade Tattoo (Lye) 1937 5th Ave Girl (La Cava) 1939 The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman) 1943 The House on Telegraph Hill (Wise) 1951 The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Walsh) 1956 One Hundred and One Dalmatians (Luske & Reitherman) 1961 Charulata (Ray) 1964 The Pumpkin Eater (Clayton) 1964 Petulia (Lester) 1968 Indecent Desires (Wishman) 1968 Top of the Heap (St. John) 1972 The United States of American (Gordon & Benning) 1975 Night of the Hunted (Rollin) 1980 Shoot the Moon (Parker) 1982 The Stuff (Cohen) 1985 That’s Life (Edwards) 1986 Faceless (Franco) 1987 White Hunter Black Heart (Eastwood) 1990 Deep Blues (Mugge) 1992 Cabin Boy (Resnick) 1994 Secrets & Lies (Leigh) 1996 Honey Moccasin (Niro) 1998 The Gates (Maysles) 2007 Project X (Nourizadeh) 2012 Subject to Review (Anthony) 2019 Patrick (Fowler) 2020 Film About a Father Who (Sachs) 2020 Dear Chantal (Pereda) 2021 What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Koberidze) 2021
CHRIS SHIELDS 1. Annette 2. Nina Wu 3. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue 4. Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts 5. About Endlessness 6. Film About a Father Who 7. Beginning 8. Raging Fire
Seventh Row: Best Documentaries of 2021 & Best Films of 2021 Lists
Best Docs We spent a large part of 2021 writing an ebook called Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction. Seventh Row as a publication has always been interested in nonfiction cinema, but it wasn’t until Subjective realities that we realised just how much vital work is being done right now in the documentary landscape.
You’ll see on this list films like Still Processing, Procession, and North by Current, that question how filmmaking can be a tool to help people process grief and trauma. You’ll find films like No Ordinary Man and John Ware Reclaimed, which use documentary as a way to reclaim historical narratives about marginalised people. There’s films on this list that interrogate family bonds, colonialism, and immigration, all in innovative and deeply empathetic ways. They prove that there’s no greater tool than nonfiction to question how stories are told, and to tell new ones.
Best Films On today’s Seventh Row Podcast episode on the best films of 2021, we concluded that it’s been an exceptional year for cinema, so much so that even our top ten couldn’t hold all the films we thought were enduringly special. What’s also striking is that, to find the incredible films that populate our top thirty of the year, we had to look outside of the USA, even though that’s the country that usually dominates awards and trade publications’ lists. Our list only features three American films, all of them documentaries, compared to last year’s ten.
5. Film About a Father Who feels like a culmination of a career of family-focused work; it’s ambitious, attempting to take in the whole scope of Ira Sachs Sr.’s life. In non-chronological fragments, through footage spanning from the present day back to 1965, Sachs seeks to understand the complicated, unknowable figure of her father. In the end, the film doesn’t aim to be a comprehensive character study of Ira Sachs Sr.; Sachs realises that she has only so much access to her father’s mind, especially now that his declining health means that he can’t speak that much. Instead, she works with what she does have: access to herself, and to an extent, her siblings, to examine the bruises that a father leaves on his children, and how they attempt to heal.” Read the full profile.
Doc Corner: The 25 Best Documentaries of 2021 (and where to see them)
Dear readers, I watch a lot of movies. Then again, what else was I supposed to do throughout yet another pandemic year with city-wide lockdowns and curfews? Which is why it was no real struggle at all to think of enough titles to make this list of the 25 best documentaries of 2021. Nor why I do not consider it the least bit excessive. Movies are great, so let’s celebrate them!
23. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO, Lynne Sachs From my review: It’s a deeply personal work of biography (via autobiography), of course. … Sachs, in fact, builds her own cinematic grammar to help construct an understanding of her father, reckoning with the mistakes that lead to where they all are in 2020. [Where to see it: Streaming on the Criterion Channel]
The state of surveillance, intimate music celebrations, Helen Keller’s socialist ethos, refugee tales, examining the scars of abuse in the Catholic Church, and living a life solely through cinema—just a few of the subjects and stories this year’s documentaries brought us. With 2021 wrapping up, we’ve selected 16 features in the field that left us most impressed. If you’re looking for where to stream them, check out our handy guide here.
All Light, Everywhere (Theo Anthony) Seemingly birthed from some kind of virtuosic computer algorithm or beamed directly from outer space, Theo Anthony’s debut feature Rat Film was a peculiarly engaging, wholly fascinating documentary. Using the population of rats to chart the history of classism and systemic racism throughout Baltimore over decades, it heralded an original new voice in nonfiction filmmaking. When it comes to his follow-up All Light, Everywhere, Anthony casts a wider focus while still retaining the same unique vision as he explores how technological breakthroughs (and pitfalls) in filmmaking have reverberated throughout history to both embolden and trick our perceptions of perspective. To thread these strands and see its modern-day effects, the majority of the film looks at the engineering behind police body cameras, and the extensive use of those devices and other surveillance equipment to support officers in cases where evidence might otherwise come down to only verbal testimonies. – Jordan R. (full review)
Attica (Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry) There’s a moment towards the end of Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry’s documentary Attica where a white state trooper is seen putting his fist in the air while screaming, “That’s White Power!” The other men around him smile and cheer because they’ve scored a victory for white men in blue. They’ve just taken back the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility after a five-day stand-off where about 1,200 inmates rebelled and took 42 staff members hostage to negotiate prison reform. And they did it, in their own words, with “White Power.” How is “White Power” defined? Well, as the footage and first-hand accounts reveal, it means knowingly picking off unarmed Black and Brown men with high-powered artillery after saying they wouldn’t be hurt. “White Power” is white supremacy. And cowardice. – Jared M. (full review)
The Beatles: Get Back (Peter Jackson) Let’s not ignore the key flaws: the digital grading can run far more egregious than Smooth Ringo, at times flattening these historic images to resemble 480p YouTube content; whether it be victim of available material or poor contemporary instinct, some editing (especially in part one) tries to keep our attention when we’re really here for the minutiae; and even to this Beatles freak it’s a mite too long. And yet. You realize, no, you’ve really never seen Lennon and McCartney talking one-on-one, in private, about basic tasks of running their band, and while you saw that one piece of incredible footage in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be, that was 11 years ago on Google Video. (Let’s not even get into now-clear implications the 1970 film is something of a hit piece.) In full view of its seven-and-a-half hours, Peter Jackson’s documentary is nearly impossible to discount: it seeks a vision of genius at work and finds it in the struggle of friends about to come apart. – Nick N.
Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito) You may have known that Helen Keller was a comrade, a life-long socialist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World; in Her Socialist Smile, John Gianvito assembles Keller’s political addresses and writings into a portrait of a warrior for social justice and a passionate, insightful proselytizer of Marxist thought. She instigated a Braille translation of Bakunin and advocated for a general strike during the first Red Scare. Now, in a time of national self-criticism, when seemingly no American monument is safe from revisionism, Helen Keller emerges from Her Socialist Smile to appear even more inspiring, relevant, and righteous than in the official narrative—appears, perhaps, the only truly based person they teach you about in elementary school. – Mark A. (full review)
Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir) “Look how far God has brought us. We can only go where God guides us to. We are exactly where God wants us to be.” These are the first words spoken in Jessica Beshir’s ruminative and ravishing feature debut Faya Dayi, and it establishes a conversational dialogue with a higher realm that carries through the rest of this graceful, ethereal journey through Ethiopia. Specifically exploring the trade of the khat leaf––a hallucinatory plant used by Sufi Muslims for religious meditation but has now become Ethiopia’s most lucrative cash crop––Beshir deeply immerses the viewer into daily work, spiritual ponderings, and questions of life’s purpose. At times recalling Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s striking black-and-white debut Mysterious Object at Noon and the vivid chiaroscuro work of Pedro Costa, Faya Dayi shares a similar approach to mixing documentary and narrative elements to form a transportive ethnographic survey. – Jordan R. (full review)
Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs) While director Lynne Sachs admits her latest documentary Film About a Father Who could be superficially construed as a portrait (the title alludes to and the content revolves around her father Ira), she labels it a reckoning instead. With thirty-five years of footage shot across varied formats and devices to cull through and piece together, the result becomes less about providing a clear picture of who this man is and more about understanding the cost of his actions. Whether it began that way or not, however, it surely didn’t take long to realize how deep a drop the rabbit hole of his life would prove. Sachs jumped in to discover truths surrounding her childhood only to fall through numerous false bottoms that revealed truths she couldn’t even imagine. – Jared M. (full review)
Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen) There have, of course, been a great many animated films about deeply serious subjects, many in recent years—Persepolis to Anomalisa to Waltz With Bashir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee can now comfortably fit on this shelf of profoundly affecting films. Indeed, this 2021 Sundance Film Festival premiere ranks as one of the most uniquely memorable animated films of the last decade. It is remarkably successful as a study of the refugee experience, as a coming-of-age drama set against a backdrop of fear and danger, and as a tribute to one individual’s ability to survive and even flourish. – Chris S. (full review)
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Frank Beauvais) After watching over 400 films in the span of just four months, director Frank Beauvais reflects on his life and what led to this cinematic hibernation in Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, an impressive, rapidly edited, deeply personal cinematic essay. Created solely from clips of the films he watched, it’s far from the kind of video essays that dominate YouTube, rather selecting the briefest of moments, and usually the least-recognizable of shots, to craft self-exploration of a reflective, questioning mind. – Jordan R.
No Ordinary Man (Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt) In 1998, Dianne Middlebrook published Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, and the narrative around Billy Tipton’s life was warped. The truth was that Tipton, a successful jazz musician who lived from 1914 to 1989, was a transgender man who lived most of his life pretending to be a cisgender man. When he died, medical examinations revealed that Tipton had been assigned female at birth, which was news to Tipton’s ex-partner Kitty Kelly and their three adopted children. A media circus ensued that presented Tipton as a woman who posed as a man to get ahead in a sexist music industry. Middlebrook’s biography perpetuated that false narrative. – Orla S. (full review)
Procession (Robert Greene) It begins with a press conference wherein Michael Sandridge, Tom Viviano, and Mike Foreman—all survivors of abuse—discuss how the Catholic Church in Kansas allowed priests to groom and assault them. It’s an obviously tense scene, in large part because of how the Church has engaged in a coordinated cover-up spanning decades, moving pedophiles around to deflect and confuse while simultaneously expanding the number of their victims. Foreman is justifiably enraged as he incredulously scoffs at the fact that the establishment has propped itself upon the salvation of statutes of limitations rather than the empathetic, Christian principles dictated via confession. Those in power would rather hide and lie than admit their complicity while sanctimoniously asking us to believe they’re God’s chosen few. – Jared M. (full review)
Sabaya (Hogir Hirori) Tense and gripping, Hogir Hirori’s documentary Sabaya never positions itself as a thriller. There’s no need. Barring a few cards of scene-setting exposition, this vital dispatch embeds viewers with a rescue operation in the Middle East, and does so with a degree of first-person access that’s not just instantly bold: it’s nerve-janglingly scary. – Isaac F. (full review)
Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Amir “Questlove” Thompson) The biggest block party of 1969 took place over six weeks in central Harlem. Clustered together into the rocky confines of Mt. Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park), 300,000 people spent their summer grooving to a free outdoor concert series that featured some of the world’s best gospel, blues, and R&B singers alive. At the intersection of the country’s racial and social revolution, the “Harlem Cultural Festival” offered a cathartic and electric musical experience for those in attendance, combining song and spoken word that inspired and unified. It was also largely forgotten. Which makes Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) both a documentary and a rectification of history. – Jake K. (full review)
The Witches of the Orient (Julien Faraut) Never doubt a documentary filmmaker’s propensity to eke out the narrowest of niches. We’ve had films on spelling bees and İstanbullu kitties, but the latest comes to us from Japan, via France, and the story of the unlikely heroes of the 1964 Japanese Women’s Olympic volleyball team––and their still less likely second act in the world of anime. The Witches of the Orient offers some flare to go with that intriguing duality: a stylish structure in which footage of the team’s greatest feats are intercut with corresponding animations from the TV shows they later inspired. – Rory O. (full review)
The Two Sights (Joshua Bonnetta) To quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for documentarian Joshua Bonnetta, the Scottish Outer Hebrides is something of a “very silly place.” This is not to denigrate the remote cluster of islands on Scotland’s northern tip, and its inhabitants––far from it. More that, when taken as a whole, Bonnetta has been able to uncover a vast cluster of eccentricity on these sparsely populated lands, where people can see, hear or intuit things others can’t, and then tell of it gladly. Empirical science would question this, of course, but Bonnetta’s interviewees seem to transcend that, and instead carry knowledge more common to the animist practices of early homo sapiens, or maybe another plane of human evolution altogether. To cite a timely cinematic reference point, the desired end-goal of the Bene Gesserit breeding project in Dune, is this ability to intuit the future––the cutting-edge of human evolution in author Frank Herbert’s computer-absent neo-feudal world. – David K. (full review)
The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes) If you told people in 1967 that Andy Warhol’s house band just released one of the most revered rock albums of all-time, they would ask what they’re called, and when you told them they would laugh. As far as the public was concerned, there were a hundred acts capable of that historical success in the ‘60s, and none were called the Velvet Underground (or Nico). To a certain extent they would be right. It would be another decade before the banana-adorned The Velvet Underground & Nico would have its pop cultural comeuppance and over half a century before the glam avant-garde group would receive definitive documentary treatment by one of the best living filmmakers. But as history and said doc have proven, we would have the last laugh in that exchange. – Luke H. (full review)
The Viewing Booth (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz) Reality has become an illusion. Look no further than Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s latest documentary The Viewing Booth. He began it as an exercise to see how different people view the same non-fiction footage through their own personal lens of identity. He found seven students with an interest in Israel that were willing to be filmed while screening a selection of YouTube videos he hand-picked as representative of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians where it concerns the occupied territories. Twenty were uploaded by sources with obvious pro-Israeli military ties and twenty others were uploaded by organizations like B’Tselem in pursuit of documenting human rights violations taking place in Jerusalem. How would these co-eds react to each? How would they be impacted by the content? Could their positions be shifted? – Jared M. (full review)
“Thoughts on Making Films with Barbara Hammer” by Lynne Sachs Published in Camera Obscura, Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies Duke University Press Volume 36, Number 3 (108) Dec. 2021
Abstract This personal essay articulates filmmaker Lynne Sachs’s experiences working with experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Sachs conveys the journey of her relationship with Hammer when they were both artists living in San Francisco in the late 1980s and 1990s and then later in New York City. Sachs initially discusses her experiences making Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (US, 2018), which includes Hammer, the conceptual and performance artist Carolee Schneemann, and the experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson. She then discusses her 2019 film, A Month of Single Frames, which uses material from Hammer’s 1998 artist residency in a Cape Cod shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds, and kept a journal. In 2018, Hammer began her process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds, and writing from the residency to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Sachs explores Hammer’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a way to be in dialogue with both Hammer and her audience. This essay provides context for the intentions and challenges that grew out of both of these film collaborations.
Barbara Hammer and I met in 1987 at a time when the Bay Area was affordable enough to become a mecca for alternative, underground, experimental filmmaking. She taught me the fine, solitary craft of optical printing during a weekend workshop, thus beginning a friendship that eventually followed us across the country to New York City. We were able to see each other often during the last few years of her life. Between 2015 to 2017, Barbara agreed to be part of the making of my short experimental documentary Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018) a three-part film that includes Carolee Schneemann and Gunvor Nelson. I met all three women in the late 80s and early 90s in the San Francisco experimental film community and kept in close touch with each of them, both in person and through virtual correspondences, for many years. All three were renowned artists and beloved friends, just a generation older than I, who had embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Gunvor’s village in Sweden to Barbara’s West Village studio, I shot film with each woman in the place where she found grounding and spark.
Barbara believed that I would see her at her best on a Tuesday, the day of the week in which she would be most energetic after her chemotherapy treatments. That afternoon, I “directed” Barbara to run along a fence as fast as she could toward the camera, without realizing that I had calibrated the f/stops on my camera to reveal the shadow from the fence across her body, creating a fabulous series of stripes in the resulting image. I returned to Barbara’s studio during another chemo period. As we stood together holding our cameras, I thought about her films Sanctus (1990) and Vital Signs (1991), which she was making when we first met in San Francisco. In Barbara’s prescient words, these films “make the invisible, visible, revealing the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects the hidden fragility of interior organ systems.” (Barbara Hammer, Electronic Arts Intermix, description of 16mm film, 1990). That afternoon in her studio, Barbara picked up one heavy 16mm camera after another. She then proceeded to dance with her furniture, embracing that robust physicality so many of us associate with her performative work. In this, my first collaboration with Barbara, I had the chance to photograph her trademark interactions with absolutely any objects she could get her hands on. For both of us, these moments of creative intimacy became the gift we somehow expected from our open, porous artmaking practice. We both wanted more, and by 2018 Barbara had figured out the way to make it happen.
Barbara asked me to come to her home to discuss something she needed to say in person. I immediately faced a complicated set of emotions. This was around the time she gave the talk “The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)” at the Whitney Museum. Inspired by Rainer Marie Rilke’s book Letters to a Young Poet, she ruminated on the experiences of living with advanced cancer while making art. In her performative lecture, she shared examples from her art-making practice and deeply considered, lucid thoughts on her experience of dying. I knew that this tête-à-tête would involve some kind of good-bye, but I had no idea that she had decided to share a part of her personal archive, and thus a part of her being on this earth, with me. Filmmaking, in the tradition that Barbara and I have espoused for most of our lives as experimental makers, involves a deeply focused solitary period of introspection. A complementary aspect of our practice, however, calls for playful, engaged exchanges with all of the people in the film — both in front and behind the camera. Fundamental to Barbara’s sense of herself as an artist was her commitment to deep and lasting intellectual engagement with her fellow artists in the field, particularly other women who were also trying to find an aesthetic language that could speak about the issues that meant so much to us. By asking me to work with her, alongside her but not “for” her, Barbara, a feminist filmmaker, was actually creating an entirely new vision of the artist’s legacy.
As I sat at her side in the apartment she shared with her life partner Florrie Burke, she explained to me that she had obtained funding from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio for this endeavor. There was money and post-production support for her to invite three other filmmakers (Deborah Stratman, Mark Street, and Dan Veltri) to complete films from her archive of unfinished projects. Barbara vividly described to me her 1998 artist residency in Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
For one month, she lived and made her art in a shack without running water or electricity. While in her Dune Shack, as it is still called, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, made field recordings, and kept a journal. Barbara’s only instructions to me were very simple: “Do absolutely whatever you want with this material.”
Knowing her work as I did, it was not surprising to me that she was able to face her imminent death in this open, intimate, transparent, and sensual way. From Sanctus and Vital Signs — both of which excavated her own shock and sadness in the face of the AIDS epidemic — to Evidentiary Bodies (2018), which confronted and embraced her own cancer, Barbara developed a precise visual aesthetic that traced her own relationship to her end. Whether she was using her phenomenal optical printing and matting techniques in the studio or performing for the camera, she found an astonishingly inventive cinematic language to explore the resonances of both disease and death. It was with Evidentiary Bodies, her final work that was at the core of her Whitney talk, that she so eloquently witnessed her departure.
About that film, Barbara wrote of herself in the third person:
“The work is experienced and perceived through the performer’s body as we breathe together remembering that cancer is not a ‘battle,’ cancer is a disease. There are aberrant cells not ‘deadly foes.’ She is not ‘combative’ and ‘brave,’ she is living with cancer. She is not going to win or lose her ‘battle.’ She is not a ‘survivor,’ she is living with cancer. There is not a ‘war’ on cancer; there is concentrated research.”
Barbara always had an uncanny ability to understand herself from the inside out and from the outside in. Her films were visceral and personal. They were also exhilaratingly political. As I read through Barbara’s Dune Shack journal, I noticed that she referred to herself in the first and the third person, moving between from the I to the she.
“This morning I began the film. I didn’t shoot it. I saw it. The dark triangular shadow of the shack out the west end window of the upstairs bedroom would shrink and disappear as I sat sweating, single-framing second by second.”
“She had turned 60 today. She was almost the age her mother was when she died, regretful of not living her dreams and desires out into an old age. How resentful she would feel were she to die three years from today. Die without having had her pet dog, her country home, her long lazy days gardening and walking in the yard. Die without knowing the outcome of her partner’s work. The sadness of departure. The inevitable ending of breath and blood coursing. The complete and thorough blankness. “Is this why we make busy,” she wondered, “so that we won’t have time or space to contemplate the heart wrenching end to this expanse called life?”
While writing the text for my own film, the words I placed on the screen came to me in a dream the day I was to begin my final edit at the Wexner Center. By this time Barbara had died. I quickly realized that this kind of oneiric encounter could become a posthumous continuation of the dialogue I had started with Barbara the year before, during the making of Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor. Since I would never again be able to speak to her about her life or the ontological nature of cinema or the textures of a sand dune, I would converse with her through A Month of Single Frames, the title I chose for my 14-minute film.
Through my writing, I tried to address Barbara’s celebration of solitude and cinematic embodiment. Ultimately, my text on the screen over Barbara’s images functions as a search for a cinematic experience that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once. It is also an embrace of an ambiguous second person you who might be Barbara herself or might be anyone watching the film.
This is how I see you.
This is how you see yourself. You are here.
I am here with you.
This place is still this place.
This place is no longer this place. It must be different.
You are alone.
I am here with you in this film. There are others here with us. We are all together.
Time less yours mine
Barbara’s imprint on my own filmmaking practice is profound. I observed in her work a conscious physical relationship to the camera. For the most part, she shot her own films and in turn found her own distinct visual language for talking about women’s lives, liberation, love, struggle, awareness, and consciousness. Discovering Barbara’s films released something in my own camerawork; my images became more self-aware, and more performative. Thinking about Barbara’s radical, improvisational and totally physical cinematography continues to push me to dive deeply and fully into my body as I am shooting.
In Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, I brought Barbara together on screen with two other pioneers of the American avant-garde. In an email, she wrote these words to me after seeing the film for the first time: “Hi Lynne, I had a chance to watch your lovely film! I was surprised at how energetically I performed for your camera. I’m honored to be grouped with such strong and remarkable filmmakers. Love, Barbara.” As aware of each other as they were of themselves, the film’s two other subjects also acknowledged her.
Carolee, who sadly died shortly before Barbara, wrote: “I loved seeing Barbara with those old Bolex cameras,” and Gunvor commented on how “Barbara moves so fast and vigorously as she walks toward the camera!”
These two films are my gifts to these women and to our shared audiences. Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor and A Month of Single Frames together attempt to reveal the great mind-body weave of Barbara Hammer’s life: her commitment to cinematic embodiment, her openness about dying, and her deeply held desire to find common space for women of all generations.
The results are in for our 2021 poll of Film Comment‘s contributors and colleagues! On this page, you’ll find a selection of the individual ballots submitted by our voters for the “Best Released Films of 2021” category, covering features that were released either theatrically or virtually in 2021 in the United States. To see which films came out on top, check out our Best Films of 2021 list, which features original appreciations from critics, as well as links to features, reviews, and interviews about these films and directors from across the year.
And for new films that our voters loved but which do not yet have stateside distribution, check out our Best Undistributed Films of 2021 list.
Anne at 13,000 ft Attica Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn Beginning El Planeta Faya Dayi Film About a Father Who France Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. Saint Maud The Power of the Dog The Viewing Booth What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
One of the most underappreciated roles in our society is the labor behind housework and caregiving. There are lots to do to maintain the upkeep of our households — laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc — but these menial tasks keep the household together and, most importantly, keep us alive and put food on the table.
Filmmakers often focus on what’s exciting and entertaining instead of the mundane, which keeps these tasks invisible in pop culture; even filmmakers interested in the charm of daily life would ignore this type of labor. However, housework and caregiving have been explored, particularly, among women filmmakers, who know the internal lives of this hidden labor.
Chantal Akerman’s three-hour Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles and Lynne Sachs’ & Lizzie Olesker’s short film The Washing Society, albeit portraying two different kinds of housework, both share a common thread: these films are making the invisible visible.
The Washing Society tells a story about laundromat workers in New York City through vignettes of fiction, nonfiction, and performance art; the film is guided by the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen strike, where hundreds of washerwomen — mostly of African-American descent — went on strike after being underpaid by their bosses. The Washing Society continues this legacy by interviewing two laundry workers and a former laundry worker who went on strike in the 1960s. The film also tells its story through three characters — two women who represent the mostly immigrant, mostly Chinese or Spanish-speaking laundry workers in New York City, and one woman representing the ghosts of the 1881 strike. When we drop off our laundry at the laundromat, we come back with a fresh load of clothing without thinking all the work that is put behind them. Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker focuses the camera on these narrow storefronts, rows and rows of washing machines, and the Sisyphean task of folding and washing clothes to bring forth that invisible labor that people don’t often think of.
My screening of The Washing Society was followed by a Q&A with feminist Marxist theorist Silvia Federici. Sachs has mentioned about how her work has been based on Federici’s work on Wages Against Housework. In her seminal essay, Federici argued that domestic labor is a form of production used to sustain other forms of work in a capitalist society. However, it is very convenient to make this form of labor invisible. A tenet of its invisibility is to mask this labor into a “labor of love” — that things such as washing clothes are marked as a care, therefore taking out the value of the work performed and expecting that careworkers are doing it based on willingness and kindness. Whereas, the reality is that these workers are indeedworkers and should be valued as such. Federici’s shaping of The Washing Society reminded me of another film, and is a helpful framework to understand it in a Marxist perspective: Jeanne Dielman.
Directed by Chantal Akerman (who has an interest of portraying domestic work on film), Jeanne Dielman is a story about a housewife who has lost her husband, therefore resorting to sex work to support herself and her teenage son. The film focuses on the minutiae of Jeanne Dielman’s day-to-day tasks; running errands is no longer a generally glossed-over issue in this film as we watch Jeanne cook meals, wash the dishes, grocery shop, and do the things we would consider as menial. While The Washing Society raises awareness to this invisible labor by employing narrative and performance art techniques, Akerman forces the audience to watch this invisible labor. The music is very sparse, the camera movement static, the pace moves slowly, making its audience truly see and listen to the details of Jeanne Dielman’s actions. The invisible, then, becomes hypervisible.
Through this hypervisibility there is a visual code that guides Jeanne Dielman’s actions. Once we focus on these mundane everyday scenes, we realize how repetitive it all gets. Folding clothes, chopping vegetables, boiling water. It’s almost like Sisyphus, rolling his boulder to the top of the mountain only to find it down on the ground again. Once the housework is done for the day, there will always be new loads to wash, more mouths to feed. Some would argue that this repetition is a type of performance art — as housework becomes hypervisible, we are exposed to the rhythm of this repetition and we are seeing it as a form of art in this context, rather than a task. The Washing Society continues this by actually transforming laundry work as performance art. In a few scenes, we see the two fictional laundromat workers rhythmically tapping on laundry machines and dancing on top of them. It is a form of ownership of their own labor — in a world where their customers and bosses do not see the value of their work, they make themselves visible.
What sets Jeanne Dielman apart from the women in The Washing Society is the solitary nature of her labor. Where laundromat workers work in groups and can form unions and negotiate against their bosses, Jeanne Dielman navigates through housework on her own. She is rarely seen communicating with people other than her son — we only see her communicate with her friends through mail, or through more laborious requests by her neighbor. She has no space to talk about these things, as the labor she performs at home is timed to a T.
However, what unites the two films are the internal space of the labor of housework. The internal spaces and thoughts of careworkers and houseworkers are often ignored, as people often impose that they’re thinking of care when they are approaching they work. The reality is definitely far from that — in a system where they work endless, repetitive tasks, they are constantly thinking. This thinking is then manifested in a form of action. The 1881 washerwomen of Atlanta forms a union and strikes for better wages. The fictional laundromat workers in The Washing Society expresses this stifled rage through performance. Jeanne Dielman, however, spends more time with her thoughts since her work is extremely solitary, and expresses them in a more pessimistic way.
What makes Jeanne Dielman’s labor more dire is that her labor isn’t valued in a tangible way. While laundromat workers are able to count their wages and identify wage theft, there is no way for Jeanne Dielman to price the value of her housework. In Capital, Marx took account the labor of housework, and including housework to be valued based on the family breadwinner’s labor-value (although this line of thought has been criticized by scholars like Silvia Federici, who argued to put a direct labor-value of housework itself). However, what happens when this breadwinner is taken out of the equation? Jeanne Dielman has to find a line of work that doesn’t interfere with her housework. In the film, she resorts to sex work, entertaining male guests in her home while her son is away at school. In the dialogue of both forms of labor that Jeanne Dielman performs, we can clearly see how both sex work and housework is tied to patriarchy — it is a form of work that is often invisible, and is dictated by the labor-value of the men who sustain the housewife/sex worker. It is not hard to see how these forms of labor are inherently exploitative to working women like Jeanne Dielman.
When we reflect on working women in patriarchy-dictated forms of labor, we have to also look at how it evolves in the future. Near the end of The Washing Society, Lynne Sachs narrates that most of the laundromats she filmed has closed, due to the rise of instant laundry apps that will pick up your laundry, wash them in an undisclosed location (where workers are completely hidden from their bosses and customers), and bring them back to you. Sachs and Olesker argues (in line with Silvia Federici) that technology has not liberated us. Instead of making work easier, work will eventually increase, and workers’ labor will be more and more alienated. If Jeanne Dielman lives in 2021, indeed, it will be easier for her to find jobs through remote work, but this work will fail to recognize how her housework will be much more laborious. COVID-19 has moved a significant amount of workforce online, and has led more bosses to assume that working from home allows workers more free time. The labor of housework was invisible from family breadwinners, and now is made invisible to bosses as well.
With the far-reaching consequences of technology to housework, we should also think about international solidarity. The rut of technologizing housework will fall to migrant workers and workers from colonized countries, as supply chain technology and transportation has eased the access of cheap labor from around the globe. This exploitation of colonized countries also lies in sex work: sex work has long become a justification for colonialism, and day after day men and women from colonized countries have been forced to enter this inherently exploitative line of work. Historian Gerda Lerner mentions how sex work is “the first form of trade, making them seen as less than human,” and that this is “the beginning of women’s subordination at the hands of men.” This exploitation still continues today through avenues like sex tourism and sex trafficking, which targets the poorest of working class women around the globe. This shows that patriarchy and capitalism definitely works hand in hand with colonialism, and that patriarchy and sexual exploitation are tools to further the empire of capitalism and imperialism.
Both Jeanne Dielman and The Washing Society brings forth these invisible strings in the lives of working women: hidden labor in housework and sex work and the exploitation that comes with it. Jeanne Dielman’s work may be solitary, but as I watched her do her menial tasks I am reminded of the hidden labor in the lives of the women I know. She experiences all of it alone, but her rage is universal, and makes me think about the power that working women around the world hold. These power materializes in labor unions, strikes, and revolutions. Working women around the world constantly continue to uphold the spirit of the women before them who also does this hidden labor, in worse circumstances of the progression of technology and the further alienation of their labor. It is up to us to fight for their rights and make the invisible visible.
The Washing Society and Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles are both available to watch through the Criterion Channel. Besides of watching both films, I also urge you to take action to support the working women in your community. Here are some current efforts in NYC (DM me if you want me to include more efforts):
Workers of the United Jewish Council (a home care agency), who are mostly Black/Latinx/immigrants/women of color, has been fighting to end the 24-hour work shifts imposed by the agency. They are holding a rally on Thursday, December 16 in front of the UJC office. More information on the AIW instagram: @aiwcampaign
After the Q&A, Sachs, Olesker, and Federici highlighted the work of NYC’s Laundry Workers Center. They are an organization aiming to support and protect workers in NYC laundromats. You can donate to their fund or check out their website for the campaigns they are running. More information can be found in their website: www.lwcu.org.
In addition to top 2021 releases, Screen Slate has once again invited contributors, friends, critics, and filmmakers—including Michael Almereyda, Jessica Beshir, Jim Jarmusch, Radu Jude, Guy Maddin, Alex Ross Perry, Josh Safdie, Sandi Tan, and Amalia Ulman—to submit lists of 2021 “first viewings and discoveries.”
ANTHONY BANUA-SIMON The Inheritance Pig Whirlybird I Blame Society So Late So Soon Annette The Card Counter Film About a Father Who The American Sector Delphine’s Prayers
NELLIE KILLIAN These are my 30 best watches of 2021: new, new to me, and rewatches. Back Street (Stahl) 1932 Trade Tattoo (Lye) 1937 5th Ave Girl (La Cava) 1939 The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman) 1943 The House on Telegraph Hill (Wise) 1951 The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Walsh) 1956 One Hundred and One Dalmatians (Luske & Reitherman) 1961 Charulata (Ray) 1964 The Pumpkin Eater (Clayton) 1964 Petulia (Lester) 1968 Indecent Desires (Wishman) 1968 Top of the Heap (St. John) 1972 The United States of American (Gordon & Benning) 1975 Night of the Hunted (Rollin) 1980 Shoot the Moon (Parker) 1982 The Stuff (Cohen) 1985 That’s Life (Edwards) 1986 Faceless (Franco) 1987 White Hunter Black Heart (Eastwood) 1990 Deep Blues (Mugge) 1992 Cabin Boy (Resnick) 1994 Secrets & Lies (Leigh) 1996 Honey Moccasin (Niro) 1998 The Gates (Maysles) 2007 Project X (Nourizadeh) 2012 Subject to Review (Anthony) 2019 Patrick (Fowler) 2020 Film About a Father Who (Sachs) 2020 Dear Chantal (Pereda) 2021 What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Koberidze) 2021
CHRIS SHIELDS 1. Annette 2. Nina Wu 3. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue 4. Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts 5. About Endlessness 6. Film About a Father Who 7. Beginning 8. Raging Fire
In the final line of the Festival, we are pleased to announce a conversation dedicated to the work of the artist, poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who will chat with the teacher and filmmaker Libertad Gills, who is part of the Camara Lucida family. In this edition we have dedicated a focus in our Mirada Epicenter section to Lynne Sachs. The festival is still available on our website, don’t miss out on the festival.
