Not only in art, but also in the life of every person, the encounter with an ego that has been left behind for a long time or at least is convinced that you have done so is a very instructive and exciting experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about reading a diary or leafing through a photo album, but above all about the question of who you meet and what connects you with them. Especially within art, the time factor is an important aspect, as it defines the artist’s relationship to the work and, moreover, the viewer to it. Something similar happens when dealing with this earlier self, this “old” version of a person who may seem very likable, naive or even completely alien.
Perhaps this idea also forms the basis for a project like A Month of Single Frames , a collaboration between the two filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer. In 1998 Hammer was allowed to retreat to a dune hut for a few months on Cape Cod, a peninsula that belongs to the US state of Massachusetts, with the support of a non-profit organization. There was neither running water nor electricity there and Hammer used the time to film nature, to try out various film techniques, she kept a journal and a diary. Twenty years later, Hammer handed over the documents as well as the recordings to Lynne Sachs, who not only viewed them with her, but also combined the dialogue about the images, impressions and reports into a short film.
Dialogue with the world, a dialogue with people
As Hammer mentioned at one point in A Month of Single Frames , the stay in the dune hut is in a way similar to the studies of Henry David Thoreau , whose work Walden reflects the experience of the author, who spent a long time in a log cabin deep in the Massachusetts woods. On the one hand, the short film is a study of the encounter with nature, which Hammer approaches through writing and filming. A sunrise or the wind over the dunes is captured using various color filters, slowed down or sometimes alienated, sometimes even changed, when Hammer describes how she hung small, colorful paper flags in the grass. Trying out, which at the same time is also an approach to this environment, is repeatedly interrupted by a certain skepticism, a question about why it even requires a trick to approach nature.
A similar hesitation can be seen in the subsequent viewing and editing of the film material and the recordings. Hammer’s commentary, as well as the overlaid texts, seem to want to enter into a dialogue with the other self, with the world of even with the viewer itself. The ambivalence of the images, their fascination and the foreign make up the attraction of this project for the viewer, testify to finding a way of seeing the world and oneself, trying to overcome the temporal distance and to fathom the memory after so many years.
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES “A Month of Single Frames” is a short film about memory, time and dealing with the younger self. Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer succeed in creating an honest picture of the artist as well as of people who are looking for a view of themselves, their history and their surroundings. This leads to a very philosophical, beautiful and very thoughtful film.
March 16 marked two years since the passing of legendary LBGTQ filmmaker Barbara Hammer. One of her final acts as an artist was to pass along to a few fellow filmmakers some of her raw, unused footage from over the years and some of the funds she was awarded through a multi-year Wexner Center Artist Residency Award. The filmmakers were each asked to create a “collaborative” short with the assets, and three beautiful films have resulted: A Month of Single Frames, completed by Lynne Sachs; So Many Ideas Impossible to Do All, completed by Mark Street; and Vever (For Barbara), completed by Deborah Stratman.
The films were presented at the Wex in 2019 as part of the Picture Lock festival, but for those who missed that opportunity to watch (or would like to revisit the works), we’re happy to share the news that two of the films are streaming over the next couple of weeks. We’re also excited to pass along an announcement from Sachs about how she’s using Hammer’s gift to pay forward, as well as news of the films making their debut on the other side of the world.
MUBI spotlight
Through April 6, MUBI is offering a chance to watch Sachs’s and Stratman’s films in the program “Ways of Seeing with Barbara Hammer,” presented as part of a series the indie streaming site created for Women’s History Month. Here’s a thoughtful critique of the program from Tone Madison.
Last spring, A Month of Single Frames screened virtually as part of Germany’s Oberhausen Film Festival—and was awarded the fest’s Grand Prize. After Lynn Sachs received an accompanying cash award, she chose to fund a new award for one of the filmmakers in competition at this year’s Ann Arbor Film Festival, which wraps this weekend. The cash prize will be given to “a work that best conveys Hammer’s passion for celebrating and examining the experiences of women.”
We’re thrilled to share that all three of the films completed from Hammer’s footage will have their Japanese premiere next Wednesday, March 31, through a program presented by the feminist and queer art research collective Subversive Records and Theater Image Forum in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward. Unfortunately, the filmmakers can’t be there in person, but Sachs will be streamed in for a post-screening Q&A.
Best known for unabashedly erotic and trailblazing portrayals of lesbian sexuality, the pioneering queer experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer passed away in 2019 of ovarian cancer, leaving behind an extraordinary, generous legacy of love. There’s the annual Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, the profuse and expansive filmic representations of queer love and life that have paved the way for lovers (and future filmmakers) everywhere, and the many, many collaborations and endowments that Hammer has granted other artists. These include the unfinished films that became a key component in Hammer’s residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Revisiting her personal archive, Hammer pulled out footage from incomplete or abandoned films; projects that for reasons relating to money, or time, or a muddy mix of both, fell by the wayside. As her health worsened, Hammer invited four filmmakers—Lynne Sachs, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street, and Dan Veltri—to work with her on fashioning new films out of the incomplete material, giving a new lease of life to left-behind ideas.
Deborah Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara) (2019) picks up and reworks Hammer’s glimmering footage of lush Guatemalan fruit and vegetable markets, shot at the endpoint of a BMW motorbike trip that the director took in the mid-’70s to escape financial and romantic worries. Lynne Sachs’s A Month of Single Frames (2019) animates beautiful nature footage that Hammer filmed during an artist’s residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the late-’90s. These small, slightly delicate, curiously hybrid works in turn feel like votives for Hammer: jeweled little gifts that cherish her generosity of spirit and extend it outwards. (How clearly these are votives: the end title in A Month of Single Frames tells us the film was made with and for Barbara Hammer while Vever is lovingly titled for Barbara).
Hammer was alone when she was filming both sections of footage, yet the directors place her in the company of others, either through retrospective conversations or through the process of editing. The overall project has ended up catalyzing intergenerational crosswires of women artists collaborating together. There is also a strong sense in both works of the friendships informing them: whether we hear it through the medium of a telephone conversation in Stratman’s film, or in Sachs’s recorded conversation with Hammer on aging and their creative process. Rather than Nitrate Kisses, these are loving, alive and dynamic nitrate homages.
“To Fill Up this Expanse called LIfe”: A Month of Single Frames
In 1998, Hammer took part in an artist’s residency, based in a dune shack in the hook-shaped peninsula of Cape Cod. With limited resources and no electricity, she found herself face-to-face with the elements, as well as her own solitude. She kept a written diary and filmed what she saw there on her Beaulieu camera, shooting at speeds of up to 8 frames per second to see what would emerge from the exercise of looking: “I didn’t shoot it, I saw it,” Hammer reflects in voice-over. Recorded some twenty years later, Hammer reads from her diaries of the period at the behest of her friend and collaborator, the artist Lynne Sachs. The material that emerged from Hammer’s month of filming evokes a gorgeous, sun-drenched pastoralism not unlike her earlier, sexually-explicit and experimental nature films like Women I Love (1979) and Dyketactics (1974). This footage however is marked by the total absence of other people, confronting us instead with the filmmaker’s embodied and intimate relationship with the world around her. Shadows dance on the walls of the shack as moons and setting suns sweep past in dreams of time-lapse photography. Sand dunes glitter in iridescent colors while the long, delicate fringes of beach grass sway in the sea-blasted air. The images shift in scale but maintain their intimacy, from the vastness of the sand dunes to the microscopic details on a grain of sand. “I am overwhelmed by simplicity. There is so much to see,” she observes. This footage is beautiful, perhaps too beautiful—Sachs has said in an interview that Hammer abandoned the project partly because it was “too pretty.” But seen through the colored transparencies and prismatic lenses that Hammer brings to the landscape (a throwback, perhaps, to her early light projection-based works), we are reminded that this vision of the natural world is very much mediated: “Why is it,” Hammer muses, that “I can’t see nature whole and pure without artifice?”
Reading from her journal some twenty years later, Hammer’s voice gives the edited footage the feel of a diary film, connecting us back in time to the woman who danced and filmed on the dunes. An awareness of the time that has passed imbues this short with a melancholy nostalgia while reminding us of the simplicity of pleasure, the microscopic details of beauty around us, the feel of the world. A colleague and friend of Hammer’s for over 30 years, Sachs reflects on the process of getting older: “I’m turning 60!” she says, as Hammer emits a wry chuckle. In the beautiful majesty of its nature footage and its reflections on small pleasures, the film made me think, like so much else these days, about the importance of how we choose to “fill up this expanse called life.” Sachs tells Hammer that though she is alone, she is there with her in the film, and we are there too. That through art, through film, we are rarely ever entirely on our own.
Vever (for Barbara)
Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara) is a more expansive film than Sachs’s in the sense that it throws its net out to a wider range of ideas. The artist draws together Hammer’s Chick Strand-esque, associative footage of Guatemalan street scenes with Maya Deren’s reflections on Voudoun initiation and failure. Brought together through overlapping webs of sound, text, and image, Vever brings these two artists into conversation with one another over the challenges of filming subjects outside of their cultures from their own personal perspectives. Both the Ukrainian-born, North American-based Deren and the North American Hammer approach the Indigenous cultures of Haiti and Guatemala respectively as outsiders. Deren was not completely at odds from the Haitian culture, even if she didn’t belong; as a Voudoun initiate, she was able to participate in a way that few like her have been able to before or since. Hammer—broke, queer, and escaping to Guatemala on her BMW motorbike—encounters a world of extraordinary beauty in the sheer abundance of local produce: from gleaming bunches of radishes and bowls of horchata to the parcels of pineapple wrapped up in banana leaves. Her camera documents the traditional practice of textile weaving, of Indigenous song and dance, and then the Western intrusion of her culture—American culture—in the Pepsi insignia invading the market. Hammer abandoned the project because “she couldn’t find any political content, or personal context” for the material, but it was there, Stratman suggests, hiding in plain sight.
The vever of the title is a ritualistic motif in the film, a spiritual crosshair that joins Hammer’s Guatemalan footage with Deren’s experiences of initiation in ‘50s Haiti. This geometric religious emblem—often etched in flour, cornmeal, ashes, or palm oil or sometimes just marked in the air—is used to invoke and compel the spiritual energies of the “loa” in different branches of Voudoun throughout the African diaspora, including Haiti. Deren described the vever in her book Divine Horsemen (1953) as a “juncture where communication between worlds is established” and I like to think of it in this film as a crossroads uniting the three artists across different worlds, cultures, and time periods. Overlaid atop of Hammer’s colorful footage, these vevers draw Hammer closer to Deren, an avant-garde stateswoman, through her abandoned footage on Haitian Voudoun. In 1947, Deren made a trip to Haiti to shoot footage for a project in which she planned to compare Haitian and Balinese ritual with the ritualistic aspects of children’s games. Although the film was never finished, Deren published a book on the topic, which was fully charged up with the energy of her direct experience of initiation. The book also included drawings of vevers scrawled by the Japanese composer Teiji Ito, Deren’s third husband and a sonic collaborator on several of her film scores.(Much later, the video label Mystic Fire Video would release a re-edited version of Deren’s film, worked on by Cherel and Teiki Ito, and titled Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti: what an abundance of unfinished, reworked, and never-quite completed films!)
Ito’s mysterious, elusive soundtrack to the avant-garde classic Meshes of the Afternoon surfaces on Stratman’s soundtrack to the film as another associate link in the chain between the three artists. It was watching Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon in a Film History class that made Hammer want to start making personal, intimate films. Hammer’s debts to Deren are inscribed in many forms, like the most recent video work Maya Deren’s Sink (2011) and back to her 1973 short I Was, I Am. In it, Hammer pulls a key from her mouth in a gesture to Deren’s film Meshes—except the key does not open her home like for Deren, but her beloved motorcycle.
Eating keys: Barbara Hammer in I Was/ I Am (1973) and Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Alone Again Or…
These shorts celebrate the open-ended potential of the unfinished project. Rather than viewing our abandoned or incomplete jobs as failures, why don’t we see them instead as spaces of possibility? Hammer resisted completing these film projects because she felt she didn’t have something concrete to say at that moment. Maya Deren struggled with falling into the trap of summarizing, and thus totalizing her personal experiences with Voudoun initiation. The unfinished project lies expectant, in waiting, for someone or something else to come along and breathe new life into it, adding to its molecular structure a new idea or way of looking at a problem. The unfinished project is still, thankfully, unwritten.
This week, MUBI is spotlighting two short films—”A Month Of Single Frames” and “Vever (For Barbara)”— that encapsulate the late, great avant-garde filmmaker.
Few filmmakers are as foundational to American cinema yet as underappreciated as Barbara Hammer. At face value, this may be a result of her penchant to feature healthy amounts of frontal nudity, but her films’ confrontational marriage of the personal and political is probably more to blame. Hammer’s early work could be seen as a sort of feminist furthering of the principles of Direct Cinema, making the camera an extension of herself to document lived experience.
More formally inventive and abstract work was the point; the heightened nature of perception is too complicated to accurately capture by just pointing and shooting. Sensations, particularly those experienced by queer women, demanded an avant-garde style to accompany the feminist theory of the films. While subjects and themes of Hammer’s output changed over time (as she began cancer treatments in 2006), this political ethos always remained. Her work exists in a lineage of queer experimental artists who recognized that radical ideas demand radical forms, and that the personal and political are always entwined.
Given her vast filmography, MUBI’s recent selection of Hammer’s films— including 2019’s A Month Of Single Frames (co-directed with Lynne Sachs) and Deborah Stratman’s Hammer tribute, Vever(also from 2019)— feels like a sort of “Advanced Hammer Studies” curriculum, which focus on pieces that were completed collaboratively near the time of her death. In both shorts, Hammer and her process are subjects just as much as the landscapes and cultures she captures.
A Month of Single Frames finds Hammer towards the end of her life in conversation with Lynne Sachs. A fellow experimentalist concerned with the particulars of language and communication, Sachs is a fine complement to Hammer’s more elemental style. Working with original footage taken in 1998, Sachs edited the film with an audio track by Hammer that details the original failed project where she went to the desert and attempted to capture light patterns on the arid landscape. Single Frames shows its seams, sometimes focusing on unadorned landscape shots, and at others exhibiting unnatural changes in coloration and inorganic objects Hammer places in front of the camera.
“Why is it I can’t see nature, whole and pure, without artifice?” she wonders to herself, trying to capture the beauty of a sunrise. Considering how Hammer’s past films directly (and seemingly effortlessly) translated experience, this comes as something of a shock. She lets the viewer in on the constant struggle of attempting to remove the author, when anything intentionally captured on film is automatically removed from reality. Sachs is less focused on this dissonance in her own work and, thus, is a helpful collaborator to let Hammer out of her own head. This second layer of removal allows the work to breathe and stand as a touching portrait of someone who loved but was sometimes defeated by her own work.
MUBI’s intended companion, Deborah Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara), further fragments Hammer’s own work by putting her ethnographic footage and recorded interviews in conversation with texts and field recordings by trailblazer Maya Deren. Shooting in Guatemala in 1975, Hammer zeroes in on the labor performed by women in a local marketplace, showcasing the visually dazzling interplay of reds and oranges in the mélange of cloth. According to Hammer, her original footage was taken in a desperate time in her life when filming was a search for meaning (and more practically, for money). She characterizes this project as a failure, hence supplicating herself and her work to the editing of another filmmaker to make some sense of it decades later.
Deren’s writing that intermittently flashes on the screen is also preoccupied with artistic failure, as it documents a trip she made to Haiti in the 1950’s where she wrestled with accepting failure as a necessary part of the artistic process. Both women’s trips, especially when paired together, reek of a typical sort of white exoticization, where some foreign locale is meant to be the catalyst for a deep personal change. While the work leans problematic because of this context, its focus on failure also shows the limits of that kind of self-actualization. On their respective trips, both women realize that foreign ethnography would not save them, and the film (whether intentionally or not) is an implicit critique of this colonialist impulse.
In her voiceover to A Month Of Single Frames, Hammer at one point says she is “overwhelmed by simplicity;” although, one feels she is not giving herself enough credit. Her films employ dense historical and theoretical references, but her style has often been a focused cinematic translation of the experience of sight and touch. Rather, she is the one who has made simplicity overwhelming and challenged implicit notions about what is and isn’t simple. Listening to her detailing of failures in this regard is a refreshing insight to her process, adding another layer of humanity to an already uncommonly humane body of avant-garde work.
The pairing of A Month Of Single Frames and Vever also put Hammer’s work in a useful historical context, showing how her work grew from Deren’s and became integral to the contemporary feminist avant-garde represented by Sachs and Stratman. Hammer’s work (more of which is hosted on the Capricious Gallery’s Vimeo page) is a necessary piece of the past, present, and future of radical film.
Maxwell Courtright Maxwell Courtright works as a case manager for adults with disabilities in Madison. He formerly worked with WUD Film and programmed the 2015-2016 season of the Starlight Experimental Film series.
SYNOPSIS In 1998 lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer took part in a one-month residency at a Cape Cod dune shack without running water or electricity, where she shot film, recorded sound and kept a journal. In 2018 she gave all of this material to Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with it.
OUR TAKE Turning to an unfinished film project by the pioneering queer experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, Lynne Sachs animates the material into a loving dialogue with the director. A shimmering, kaleidoscopic diary film that gently reflects on aging, solitude and the sheer beauty of the world around us.
SHOWING AS PART OF WAYS OF SEEING WITH BARBARA HAMMER Best known for her frank portrayals of lesbian sexuality, the pioneering queer experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer sadly passed away in 2019, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy. A small part of this is the unfinished films that became a key component in Hammer’s residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts. As her health worsened, Hammer invited several filmmakers, including Lynne Sachs and Deborah Stratman, to work with her on fashioning new works out of the incomplete material. This project catalyzed dynamic intergenerational collaborations between Hammer’s material and the new filmmakers: Both Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara) and Sachs’s A Month of Single Frames invite us to explore new ways of seeing with the unforgettable, and much missed Barbara Hammer.
The arthouse streaming provider Mubi has added the cinematic diary poem “A Month of Single Frames” to its range. In the 14-minute work, the American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs processes recordings made by her fellow artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). The pioneer of lesbian avant-garde cinema lived in a hut on Cape Cod in Massachusetts for a month in 1998 and captured her impressions of the secluded life with 8 and 16mm cameras, sound recordings and notes. In view of a progressive cancer disease, she handed the unused material over to Lynne Sachs in 2018, who added her own images and texts.
In her blog “ From the first person,” Siegfried Kracauer scholarship holder Esther Buss paid tribute to the unusual project as a joint effort in January 2021, in which the collaboration does not serve to disguise, but rather to progress. The collaboration reflects a shared experience in a singular way that represents women’s friendship as well as a lively form of estate work: “One has seldom seen a tale of loneliness and nature more turned towards the world.”
In the jointly written diary-poem “A Month of Single Frames”, the American experimental filmmaker processes recordings by her artist colleague Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019. The collaboration does not serve the purpose of concealment, as Esther Buss elaborates in her Kracauer blog, but of progression: the “we” is like opening a door.
Lynne Sachs’ A Month of Single Frames (2020) is a collaborative diary-poem made with and for Barbara Hammer. That’s what it says at the end of the film. Hammer, a pioneer of avant-garde lesbian cinema who passed away in 2019, has always been generous in her work. In her short, experimental films, but also in the memoirs published in 2010 (“ Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life ”), she shared her own (sensual and sexual) experiences and placed them in a larger context of collective queer identity.
Hammer was also generous with his own authorship. As the artist began to organize her estate as her cancer progressed, she gave the younger Lynne Sachs 8mm and 16mm images, sound recordings, and notes that were made twenty years earlier during a month-long residency on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and have resided ever since had stayed. Sachs was invited to make a film from the footage. “ A Month of Single Frames ”, almost 14 minutes long, is the result of this invitation, which in turn is an expression of a female friendship as well as a living concept of estate work.
A form of community building
A form of community building is also inherent in Lynne Sachs’ films. They often emerge from close collaborations, for example with close or distant family members, with migrant communities and artistic companions. In Film About A Father Who (2020), her most recent work, she approaches the elusive figure of her father, Ira Sachs – father of nine children by many different women – in the form of a fractured essay shared with numerous voices and perspectives . In “ Your Day is My Night’ (2013) ‘sharing’, on the other hand, is an economic necessity. The subject and setting of the film is a so-called “shift-bed” apartment in Chinatown – an apartment in which Chinese immigrants share a bed in shifts, in line with their precarious day and night jobs. What connects Sachs most closely with Hammer, however, is their understanding of film as a physical, tactile experience. “A Month of Single Frames” also wants to be experienced rather than viewed.
Wants to be viewed less, experienced more: “A Month of Single Frames” (Lynne Sachs)
Retreating to a secluded hut without electricity and running water is a motif charged with cultural history, especially in Massachusetts, after all, the legendary “Walden Pond” is barely more than 200 kilometers away. (Thoreau also wrote a book about Cape Cod, which is less well known). However, “A Month of Single Frames” is anything but introspection and nature-pious contemplation; one has seldom seen a tale of loneliness and nature that is more open to the world. On the one hand, this is due to Hammer’s extremely haptic images and her very own understanding of “visual pleasure”. On the other hand, the posthumous editing by Sachs, which opens up the space for a shared experience.
Overwhelmed by simplicity
Lynne Sachs assembled tape recordings that were made shortly before her friend’s death in April 2019 in her studio – she had Hammer read from her “Duneshack” journal, you can also hear fragments of their conversation – with film images: recordings of insects, the sparse vegetation in the dunes, of light reflections, shadow plays and weather changes, of banal everyday things that transform into lyrical objects in the camera’s view. “I am overwhelmed by simplicity,” Hammer is once heard to say emphatically to the image of a shred of plastic film blowing in the wind. Another time, she gazes in fascination at a bow tie in which she recognizes a miniature army helicopter patrolling the coast. Despite all the amazement at the many things that are waiting to be discovered with the senses: Her delight in cinematic experimentation overwhelms any attempt at naturalistic viewing. “Why is it I can’t see nature whole and pure without artifice?” Hammer once wondered.
She played extensively with the possibilities of camera technology, for example by slowing down the throughput of the film material until single frames were recorded. Elsewhere, colored foils cast colorful lights in the sand or immerse the landscape in shimmering, luminous magenta.
“I’m here with you in this movie”
The most striking sign of the “second” authorship is Sachs’ own text. In it, the friend who is both present and absent is addressed. He lies “silently” over the image, is an authorial voice in a reflective soliloquy as well as a voice in an intimate dialogue, which finally dissolves in the collective of all those who are watching the film “together” at that moment. “You are alone” – “I am here with you in this film” – “There are others here with us” – “We are all together”.
We Are All Together: “A Month of Single Frames” (Lynne Sachs)
With the circulation and multiplication of personal pronouns, tooChantal Akerman in her films, such as “I, you, he, she ” (1974). With Sachs, however, behind the sequence of pronouns is not the veiling of the self, but progression. The “we” in the film is like opening a door. One is called, invited in, feels meant. One is everywhere now: in Cape Cod, in Hammer’s studio, in the film images, alone and with everyone.
By Giulia Rho March 8, 2021 Club Des Femmes https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/portfolio-item/culture-club-watching16/
MUBI is screening A Month of Single Frames (from Mon 8 March) and Vever (from Tues 9 March) to mark International Women’s Day 2021.
To support their programming, MUBI are offering 30 days’ free viewing (starting whenever you choose) of all the films on their platform to Club des Femmes’ readers and friends!
Ways of Seeing with Barbara Hammer
“I am overwhelmed by simplicity. There is so much to see”, recites an ageing Barbara Hammer from her diary. An entry that dates back to 1998, when the filmmaker was conducting a one-month residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with only the dunes and the ocean to keep her company. “I feel compelled to do absolutely nothing. There is nothing to do”, she recounts, as the camera shows us the artist taking a shower outside, in the nude, at ease with her backdrop of sun-scorched sand grass. These moments appear suspended in time, at once very distant from me and very close, like memories of my own from my college years in Boston and weekend escapes to the coast. I find myself wondering how Barbara Hammer could extract these images from my mind, as they soar away from me into the past.
Lynne Sachs, who directed Barbara to read selected excerpts from the diary out loud for her film A Month in Single Frames (2019), edits together the artist’s unused footage with oneiric lyricism, giving us brilliant frames of pure light, extreme closeups of flowers and time lapses of clouds journeying through the expansive American sky. Fractals of colors artificially created by Barbara with rainbow gel flags overlap and fade out into the hues of the scarce vegetation, and the changing sunlight on the dunes. Barbara’s own shadow appears now and then, stretched along the beach, reflected in her own artmaking, a self-inscription that travels to us, in this moment in time, and reminds us of the woman behind the camera, the body around the voiceover. The communion of human and natural, of feminine bodies and flora is a long-standing trope in Barbara Hammer’s filmmaking, appearing since her early shorts Dyketactics (1974) and Menses (1974). Naked women frolic and fuck unperturbed by the open space surrounding them. I often think of them as a Flower Child Eve, who upon eating the forbidden fruit and realising she is naked, instead of covering herself with leaves, shrugs it off, and revels in her own skin.
Bugs, strands of grass and little toys populate A Month of Single Frames, inhabiting it like a doll house, an artificial space that seems to encompass “the expanse called life” as a terminally ill Hammer looks back to it. Like in the most famous still from this film: a little glass contains the whole ocean.
Back when the film was released in 2019, none of us could have imagined the emotional resonance a film about the smallness of life would hold just a year later. And yet, this Thoreauvian Cape Cod, this meditation on the passing of time and the beauty of everyday, now insistently reminds me of my Instagram feed, which, during several lockdowns, has filled with little pleasures and stolen moments of domesticity. The arrangement of fruits in a colourful bowl when the light hits just right, a pet that appears to be smiling at the camera, the corner of a white building slashing the blue sky, can now all bring tears to my eyes. As part of my PhD practice, I spend most days researching images of the banality of beauty, captured by a past generation of feminist filmmakers of which Hammer was part. I survey their movies like a detective, waiting for hints of these lives gone by, and I continually find my own. The re-evaluation of the mundane preached by Thoreau and Whitman and exemplified by the American avant-garde has returned in our habit of documenting days that follow one another in a blur and posting the most fleeting joys online.
The attempt of recounting an experience of solitude through connection reiterates Lynne Sachs’ strategy of making a film with and for Barbara Hammer, repurposing the artist’s unused footage. “You are alone. I am here with you in this film. There are others here with us. We are all together”, Lynne writes, over the image of a stick drawing invisible lines in the sand. I detest that everything reminds me of the pandemic, of the present moment, rather than taking me away from it. But I love the invitation Barbara and Lynne’s collaboration extends to look at the simple and habitual like the richest treasure: “everything waits expectantly to be discovered”.
If A Month of Single Frames dwells on the natural world, Vever (2019) by Deborah Stratman revisits another trope in Barbara Hammer’s repertoire: travel. The original footage was shot in 1975 by Barbara in Guatemala, at the end of a motorcycle trip that got her away from the Bay Area, heartbreak and a troubled affair. “I needed to get away and drive”, she tells Stratman over the phone; a tremor in her voice betrays her old age. The film is bursting with energy and color, the market streets are busy, and the soundtrack of drums and flutes urges us to search the crowd expectantly, as if Barbara herself was about to appear straddling her BMW motorcycle like the heroine in an action movie. Instead, a text runs over the screen, a testimony of defeat, and failure of the artist to capture reality. We discover from the voice over that Hammer never printed the film herself because she had no “political content or personal context” to justify spending what little money she had. What motivated her to shoot this film in the first place? “I left without an intention, except to drive”, she recounts. Once the film ran out, she simply turned around and went back to San Francisco, as if the camera was the navigator.
Tribal etchings appear in answer to these doubts. The music now assumes a magical or religious tone and the human world succumbs to the jungle. It is almost an invocation, a response to the inability to master art that the text on the screen has been telling us about. In fact, the music sounds familiar. I wonder if I’m getting hypnotized, or if a memory inside me is stirring. Where have I heard it? Before I can find an answer, images from the market return. Except now it’s the end of the day, it is quieter. Over the phone, Barbara hurriedly tells Stratman that she needs to go. The screen is already black. She truly has gone, too far for us to reach her. And yet the quote we are left with reads: “great Gods cannot ride little horses”, a Haitian proverb that immediately reminds me of a picture I saw of Barbara sitting on her bike, a beautiful, powerful butch iconography. And she doesn’t feel so far anymore.
I barely have the time to smile to myself when Maya Deren’s name appears in the credits. The music that sounded so familiar is quoted from Meshes in the Afternoon, coincidentally the film that Hammer credits in her biography Hammer! (2015)as her major inspiration for becoming a filmmaker. And so, all the pieces of the film fall into place: the tribal designs, the Haitian references, the meditations on art and power. They are from Maya Deren’s own practice, and especially her religious beliefs. Barbara might have embarked on her journey to South America alone and hurting, but Stratman’s film retrospectively gives her companionship. Vever connects three generations of women and offers them to us. As we’ve learnt in Sachs’ film, we are alone together.
In voodoo tradition, which Deren studied and practiced, everything is connected unpredictably and non-hierarchically. These divine linkages are evoked through drawings like the ones that appear in the film, in fact homonymously called ‘vevers’. Once again, I can’t help thinking about our contemporary summoning practice. How we engage in invocations of another that we cannot see, who isn’t sharing our space and yet we believe to be present, at the other end of our technology. Vever opens with a loud dialing tone, a wait, before Hammer picks up the call and Stratman asks: “can you hear me okay?”. How familiar this ritual of connection has become to us all, endlessly trapped in Zoom waiting rooms repeating vocabulary from a séance. “Just barely”, replies Hammer, as the film shows her hand receiving a bowl of soup from an Indigenous woman. She is there, physically preserved in the film, in the company of Maya Deren’s words and music. And I wonder if the whole film isn’t an invocation of them, for their art to reach us today. I spend so much time with them and artists like them for my PhD that I have come to consider them friends. They aren’t, after all, that much further in time and space than my real-life friends, isolated together as we are.
Watching these films on the occasion of International Women’s Day I am left hopeful of the connections we are able to draw. Like the intricate and vibrant designs the women in Vever weave in their tapestries and clothes, so we are tethered to one another across location and generation. Surely our political practice has evolved and expanded, but we still have so much in common with the women who have come before us. I often think of philosopher Luce Irigaray’s reminder that “we already have a history” (Sexes and Genealogies, 19), and her warning against being led to believe that the past is rags rather than riches. We need to cultivate our genealogy, reworking the old in order to create something new, much like Sachs and Stratman do in their collaboration with Hammer. The possibilities to easily access their movies on MUBI is an opportunity to witness such history and interact with it. Our contemporary digital feminism can help make invisible bodies and stories visible and part of a larger discourse, like a whole ocean in a glass of water.
DIRECTED BY Trinh T. Minh-ha and Lynne Sachs with Barbara Hammer
A film from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is paired with a contemporary work that is not in the collection. The two works resonate with timeless, conceptual connections.
Whose film is it? Contemporary artists Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lynne Sachs, and the late Barbara Hammer address various forms of truth-telling and collaboration in cinema. Minh-ha challenges traditional ethnographic films, drawing attention to ways they are conspicuously shaped by the storyteller’s colonial standpoint. Sachs and Hammer elevate the possibility of shared authorship by conceiving a film shaped by Sachs’s vision of Hammer’s material.
Screening right here for free beginning at 10 am (CDT) April 20 until May 4.
MUBI, the go-to film subscription service, has revealed their list of films for March. The list includes Notturno (2020), a superb documentary by the award-winning filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi. To accompany Notturno, MUBI will also stream Rosi’s Boatman (1993), Below Sea Level (2008), and El Sicario, Room 164 (2010).
March for MUBI will also include Chloé Zhao’s debut film Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Whilst also adding two films, The Girl (1968) and Binding Sentiments (1969), by feminist Hungarian director Márta Mészáros who is celebrating her 90th birthday this year.
The current list of films on MUBI in March 2021.
1 March | The Imperialists are Still Alive! | Zeina Durra
2 March | Chinese Puzzle | Cédric Klapisch | The Spanish Apartment Trilogy
3 March | Inflatable Sex Doll of The Wastelands | Atsushi Yamatoya | Keiko Sato: Pinku Maverick
aemi’s second Year in Review programme continues to wrestle with the impact and consequences of this particular moment in time while also showcasing some of the best international artist moving image works that have helped sustain us through a period of profound change. The films in both Year in Review programmes evolve thematically; where the first programme largely dealt with a more singular psychological space: pursuits of personal development often pointing to stimulation and isolation survival tactics, Programme 2 suggests some pathways to a future defined by collective forms of participation.
We begin then with Onyeka Igwe’s No Archive Can Restore You effectively interlinking concerns common to the two programmes. Several of the films in this programme speak to the potential of spaces that connect people, considering also the roles of interlinking past and present communities within these spaces, and the future value and affect of culture developing within these environments. Music also continues to play a significant part in this programme, however the emphasis now is on highlighting togetherness through creativity and publicness, and through shared experiences of political resistance, intent and play.
This programme is available in the Republic of Ireland
A special thank you to LUX, London, and to Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago vdb.org, supporting partner of this screening
Works featured No Archive Can Restore You – Onyeka Igwe (2020, 5 min 54 sec) A Month of Single Frames – Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer (2019, 14 min) Lore – Sky Hopinka (2019, 10 min 16 sec) Queering di Teknolojik – Timothy Smith (2019, 8 min 30 sec) Seize Control of the Taj Mahal – Glenn Belverio (1991, 12 min) Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical – Rhea Storr (2020, 11 min) They Parlaient Idéale – Laure Prouvost (2019, 28 min 30 sec)
about aemi on demand aemi-on-demand is an online platform through which aemi makes curated programmes of experimental film and artist moving image work available to Irish audiences. This initiative increases and diversifies access to aemi programming and guarantees artists’ revenue for their work outside the context of in-person events. Programmes on aemi-on-demand will remain live for a fixed duration on a long-term basis, thereby giving audiences the time necessary to engage with a rich variety of content.
