Art Market Provincetown AMP: The Happenings | 2022 May 27 through June 22 http://www.artmarketprovincetown.com/happenings/
Films by Barbara Hammer, Brydie O’Connor, and Lynne Sachs
Screenings at AMP
Schedule: Dates are listed below with films. Each film will show individually and looped throughout the day – come anytime.
Films by Barbara Hammer
May 27 & June 11 | Contribution to Light: 1968, 3:42 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video. “Contribution to Light is all about my excitement and thrill at seeing reflected and refracted light. I shot the edges of pieces of found broken glass that streamed light rays broken into myriad colors. I saw, years later, a shared aesthetic in Stan Brakhage’s study of a crystal ashtray.” — Barbara Hammer
May 28 & June 12 | Multiple Orgasm: 1976, 5:32 min, color, silent, 16 mm film on HD video. This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.
May 29 & June 13 | Dream Age: 1979, 10:58 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video. A 70-year-old lesbian feminist, seeing little change in the society after years of work, sends out her 40-year-old self on a journey taking her around the perimeters of the San Francisco Bay.
“During her quest she encounters aspects of her personality: the guardian angel who has all that she needs; the seductress who leads her astray; the wise woman of secrets who she meets underground. The film culminates in a visual crescendo ascending a tower as the heroine’s hair is painted white by her counterparts. A dream vision film.” — Barbara Hammer
May 30 & June 14 | Pond and Waterfall: 1982, 15 min., color, silent, 16 mm film on video. An underwater exploration of verdant pond growth pulling the viewer into actually being the creature actively exploring.
“Hiking in Point Reyes National Seashore I came upon a vernal pool with an intriguing and mysterious underwater world. I optically printed swimming underwater to slow the movement to a meditative rhythm. I hoped that the appreciation of the clarity and beauty of water would lead us to better protect it.” — Barbara Hammer
“The camera eye is like an amphibian that sees on two levels in its journey from underwater in a safe pond down to a violent, turbulent ocean. Early in the silent film shot north of San Francisco we see an homage to Monet’s Nymphiades in the faded raspberry color of the step-printed underwater lilies. The painterly effects of the printing make the water seem viscous. Pushing through clouds of fish eggs, fronds and algae, the camera establishes a sense of intimacy and connection in a natural ecosystem. But this amiable underwaterscape acquires ominous overtones as the camera/amphibian surfaces. Splashes strike the lens, and the rock of the ocean surf is destabilizing and disorienting. One of the most provocative foreshadowing ambiguities occurs when the half-submerged camera tracks the tip and slosh of the horizon, echoing the mood change from underwater confidence to vulnerability to natural forces, a passage from balance to defiance.” — Kathleen Hulser, “Frames of Passage: Nine Recent Films of Barbara Hammer,” Centre Georges Pompidou
June 1 & June 9 | Place Mattes: 1987, 7:36 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video. As the figure and ground are presented as two planar relationships, flattened and made two-dimensional through optical printing, so the artist (figure) is unable to touch the natural environment (ground) in Puget Sound, Yosemite and the Yucatan, yet finally comes to rest in the interior space of a restaurant.
Sound Score: Terry Setter
June 2 | No No Nooky T.V.: 1987, 16mm, color and B&W, sound, 12 min. Using a 16mm Bolex and Amiga computer, Hammer creates a witty and stunning film about how women view their sexuality versus the way male images of women and sex are perceived. The impact of technology on sexuality and emotion and the sensual self is explored through computer language juxtaposed with everyday colloquial language of sex.
No No Nooky T.V. confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age.
June 3 | Two Bad Daughters: by Barbara Hammer and Paula Levine. 1988, 12:21 min, B&W and color, sound. “…The ‘Bad Daughters’ reject obedience to the Father in favor of the impish anarchy of self-possession.” — Steve Seid, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
“Two Bad Daughters, 1988, is a whirlwind tour of paternal institutions: fatherhood, Lacanian psychoanalysis and bondage. The tape turns on the dominators, using a heavy complement of graphics and manipulated images to collapse control. The stratified surface of Two Bad Daughters is playful, an energetic barrage of text, acrimony and artifice. It is play that proves most subversive. The ‘Bad Daughters’ reject obedience to the Father in favor of the impish anarchy of self-possession.” — Steve Seid, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
June 4 | Still Point: 1989, 9:14 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video. Still Point whirls around a point of centeredness as four screens of home and homelessness, travel and weather, architecture and sports signify the constant movement and haste of late twentieth century life.
“At the still point of the turning world, that’s where the dance is,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem of Four Quartets. Hammer seeks a point of quiet from which all else transiently moves.
June 5 & June 20 | Our Grief in Not a Cry for War: 2001, 3:36 min, color, sound. Hammer documents a demonstration and, in so doing, makes her own contribution to the national post–September 11 dialogue.
On October 11, 2001, in Times Square, New York City, an ad hoc group of artists named Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War silently demonstrated for peace at a time when the nation was clamoring for war and sacrificing its own civil liberties.
June 6 & June 19 | Lesbian Whale: 2015, 6:35 min, color, sound, HD video. Lesbian Whale is a video animation of Hammer’s early notebook drawings set to a sound track of commentary by the artist’s friends and peers.
“The script is composed of fragments and stray thoughts – ‘as a feminist I’m very skeptical’; ‘not necessarily physical time but emotional time’ – and it’s not quite clear whether it’s spontaneous, planned, composed by the speakers, or read from Hammer’s notebooks. If Hammer’s artistic influence is well documented, this slippage between voices, authors, and images suggests an ethos of collaboration and conviviality that may prove to be her greatest legacy.” — Andrew Kachel, Artforum
Director/Drawer/Sound Designer: Barbara Hammer. After Effects: JiYe Kim. Post Production: Valery Estabrook.
Voice Participants: A.K. Burns, Heather Cassils, Myrel Chernick, Janlori Goldman, Holly Hughes, Daniel Alexander Jones, Reena Katz, Bradford Nordeen, Liz Rosenfeld, Julia Steinmatz.
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Film by Brydie O’Connor
June 8 & June 15-16 | Love, Barbara (documentary; 15 min.)
Love, Barbara is a short documentary about the iconic legacy of pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, through the lens and love of her partner of over 30 years, Florrie Burke.
Directed by Brydie O’Connor; Featuring Florrie Burke and Barbara Hammer; Executive Produced by Anne Alexander, Jessica Chermayeff, Ana Veselic, and Brian Doyle; Produced by Brydie O’Connor and Myriam Schroeter; Cinematography by Maria Rusche; Edited by Matt Hixon; Original Score by Bryn Bliska; Color Grade by Sean Dunckley at Light Iron Post; Sound Mix & Design by Jeremy Siegel at Heard City; Supported by : The Future of Film is Female, Women Make Movies, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts
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Films by Lynne Sachs
June 10 & June 17-18 | A Month of Single Frames (Made with and for Barbara Hammer; 14 min. color sound 2019)
“In the last few months of filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s life, she asked me to come to her home to discuss something she needed to say in person. I immediately faced a complicated set of emotions. 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. As I sat at her side, 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 there, 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.” While writing the text for my own film, the words I placed on the screen came to me in a dream. I quickly realized that this kind of oneiric encounter could become a posthumous continuation of the dialogue I had started with Barbara. 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. 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.”
June 21 | Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital, 9 minutes, 2018)
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
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About the Filmmakers
Barbara Hammer | Selected Films
Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) is a feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema, who made over 90 moving image works as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages, and drawings.
During her lifetime she created two awards for lesbian and queer filmmakers, and had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York mounted a retrospective of her film, photography, drawings, and sculpture, which New York Times art critic Holland Cotter named one of the best exhibitions of that year.
Hammer’s work is held in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne. Her complete catalogue of 16 and 8mm film, as well as Super 8, is in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles, and her papers are available for review at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven.
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Brydie O’ Connor | Documentary film: Love, Barbara
Brydie O’Conner is a Kansas-bred, New York based filmmaker.
Her award-winning work spans the documentary and narrative fields with a focus on women-driven and queer stories. Brydie has directed short documentaries LOVE, BARBARA (2021) which premiered at Academy Award-qualifying Santa Barbara International Film Festival and FRIENDS OF DOROTHY (2020), which premiered in New York at DOC NYC. In 2021, Brydie was selected for The Future of Film is Female Award, and she received a NYSCA grant sponsored by Women Make Movies in addition to a Brooklyn Arts Council grant. In 2019-2020, she workshopped her forthcoming film in the Female Filmmakers Berlin Directing Lab. Much of her work is inspired by archival histories.
Brydie’s producing credits include THE LESBIAN BAR PROJECT with Executive Producer Lea DeLaria, WOMONTOWN for PBS Kansas City, and she has archival produced Season 7 of THE CIRCUS on Showtime in addition to various projects on Left/Right TV’s roster. She is a graduate of The George Washington University.
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Lynne Sachs | Films: A Month of Single Frames & Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor
Lynne Sachs is an experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn. She has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems. Working from a feminist perspective, she investigates connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. She uses letters, archives, diaries, poetry and music, to take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Over the years, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel/ Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Lynne’s films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival.
In a Zoom call, Lynne commented that she liked my wallpaper. Not having paid very close attention to it for some time, I decided to make a video or film based upon it. 3 still photographs (one tilted to the left, one to the right and one straight on) are rapidly alternated to give an impression of the pattern starting to come to life. At the end, the wallpaper, with wet paint, was printed onto a very small amount of 35mm film.
The title may evoke thoughts of the famous short story The Yellow Wallpaper, in which a woman suffering from a nervous disorder begins to claim she is hearing voices from within the wallpaper in her room. Undermining this somewhat, the piece is pointedly silent, though the painted film reveals the pattern of the wallpaper interacting with an optical soundtrack.
Demonstrating 19th century attitudes toward women’s mental and physical health, the original Yellow Wallpaper story is considered an important early work of American feminist literature.
Slamdance: News from Nowhere May 2022 https://preview.mailerlite.com/h8g0m3h0y4
Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month on Slamdance Channel
In recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the Slamdance Channel is highlighting Asian voices throughout the entire month of May, including new films premiering on the channel for the first time.
Figuring out the unique grammar of your life can be difficult. People, situations, can give us question marks with no answers and ellipses that lead to nothing. Lynne Sachs, a Memphis-born experimental filmmaker, attempted to answer some of these questions in her own life with the 2020 documentary, Film About a Father Who. She offers an in-depth look at her father and titular character.
Ira Sachs Sr. is an enigmatic hotelier out of Park City, Utah, with an unmissable mustache and a penchant for colorful button-ups. His approach to love parallels in eccentricity. He despises loving like a “swan,” the idea of mating with a single soulmate for life. Sachs Sr. chose instead to surround himself with a steady flow of young women and went on to marry—and divorce—a number of them. Many of Lynne Sachs’ childhood peers were enamored by the bravado and Hefner-esque life her father led. But this way of life caused tension at times with those closest to him, to say the absolute least.
Beginning in 1984, Lynne Sachs chronicled moments in Sachs Sr.’s life for thirty-five years and those in his mother’s, ex-wives’, children’s, and others close to him. Her mission was to elucidate his tucked-away interior life, not just to an audience but to herself. Two years after the release of the film and two years younger than when Sachs began this project, I got to speak with her about it and her greater body of work. Sachs gave a lecture at Sarah Lawrence in the fall of 2021—for those who took Tanya Goldman’s “Experimental Documentary”course. I sat in my apartment in upstate New York and called Sachs, who was in a hotel room in Paris. She’d left her Brooklyn home for a few weeks to attend a screening of her work. In our hours of conversation, what stuck with me the most was what she said about the image above. Sachs stated that it is “the most important in all of Film About a Father Who.” A scene that wasn’t even filmed by Sachs, instead by her father. It’s a tranquil look at three of her siblings as children playing in a creek. For a film that follows a bon vivant and his unorthodox lifestyle, I was taken aback that this scene was the most important.
The scene occurs once in each of the three acts, all different segments of the same shot. Why? Well, it’s part of what makes this film, like each of her films, have a unique “feeling”—or “grammar”—to them. “Grammar,” as a metaphor, is illustrated in another wonderful scene in act one. I told her,
I really loved that scene in Film About A Father Who.
In it, Sachs, her brother, and her sister sit on her childhood bed talking
about how [your father] doesn’t have a grammar and your mother does when you’re living with each of them. Do you feel that your work as a filmmaker has some sort of grammar behind it? Or is it just question marks when you go into each project?
I think that what really, really distinguishes an experimental film from a more conventional film, whether you’re talking about a documentary or a narrative or any other form, is a refusal to embrace a formula around grammar or a template—the grammar of cinema. Because people say things like, “well, a great documentary is character-driven,” or they say “you can’t break the 180-degree rule when you’re shooting,” or you must have the exposition sort of identified and articulated in a narrative film by fifteen minutes in.
There’s all these rules about the shape of things. The way shot-reverse-shot insinuates that two people are in the same room and doing things simultaneously. If you know about making films, you know that they’re probably not, but it relies on an assumption on the part of the audience that the grammar of the film will be accessible and key to that—key is familiar.
So then you jump over to something that is more playful, experimental, distinctive in terms of each work, having its own cosmos. And you think that the audience at first might be a little disoriented because the audience doesn’t understand its distinctive grammar, but through the shaping, evolution of the film, the audience starts to register how meaning is constructed. And I think that’s really exciting. And I think that is an opportunity to constantly reinvent how you work with the medium of film. When I hear about someone who says, “well, I bought this software that helps you to write your screenplays, it comes with a template.”
I think, okay, if it comes with a template, then you are going to construct time in a certain kind of way. You’re going to create your characters in a, probably, formulaic way. So I’m scared of that kind of stuff. I think it’s problematic. So, then you asked that in relationship to Film About a Father Who, and I think that every family has its own grammar as well and that the grammar is significant because it guides you in terms of how you relate to people of different generations or new members of your family. It has to do with how transparent you are. What it means to do something like tell a lie, or what is a white lie? How many different people in your family do you tell white lies to, to protect them?
What does a white lie really mean? People either withhold information or you shift information because you think the truth is going to be complicated or intimidating or painful. So you were asking about the punctuation marks—are my films question marks? I do actually like when people leave my films, asking questions of themselves or questions of society or questions more ontologically about how we construct meaning. I like that. I think that’s an opportunity for being changed by a work of art. Or perhaps being just slightly shifted by it.
There was kind of a shift at the end of the film when you bring in your sister—the one that had been removed from you for so long. A lot of stories about your father- there’s some sort of way you and your other siblings in your minds might have justified them a lot of times, but in that one, there’s no justification for what happened.
Sachs’ half-sister went on a pre-college trip with a best friend from high school, staying in a ski lodge with Sachs Sr. At the end of the vacation, her best friend announced that she had fallen for and would continue to live with her father.
I felt like that really changed the perception of the film.
Sometimes we do that with things that upset us. We create justification in order to move forward, but then it keeps gnawing at us. So if we finally come to terms with our own anguish with the recognition that the reality is not what we want it to be, but it is there and that we can’t make any more excuses for it. Then I think it’s like a cathartic experience, even if it is difficult.
Also what I loved about that film is I felt you’re really comfortable not only behind the camera but also in front. Your [1987] short film, Drawn and Quartered, you talked about how you at first edited out your face because you were so embarrassed [to show yourself nude], but then you ultimately decided to put it back in. And I felt like that was a moment of growth?
In English, we say, “oh, don’t you feel exposed.” We the word exposed on a physical level, and we use it on a psychological level.
So at that point, I was not very secure with showing my body, and I felt vulnerable and I felt too observed. But then later I made a film called the The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, and I take my clothes off a little, other people do too—it’s a lot about the body.
But what was more of an exposed feeling was the writing. The idea of that you write about things that go on in your body and the grit of it all, the pus, the urine, and all those things. But the thing is, by exposing that, you’re actually saying I’m just like everybody else.I’m a woman. My body’s like all the other women; we’re just shaped a little different. It’s when you open up and expose the narrative of your life and all the compromises that come with that–that’s even more revealing. So there’s all these layers of what it means to be exposed.
As you’ve made films throughout your career, have you felt you’ve been able to be more comfortable [in front of the camera], or was this something from the beginning you felt—
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, definitely not. Sometimes I go back — not that I do this very much — and look at my progress reports from elementary school. And my teachers would say, “Lynne is a good student, but she’s so shy.” I wasn’t a very forthright child. I wasn’t the first person to raise their hand, you know, in those situations. But I think it’s come to me, and I think part of it is, let’s say, making a film like Film About a Father Who. I was so profoundly nervous about making this film.
It’s not just because I was exposing myself to you or to anyone else in the audience, but I was exposing myself, my life to myself. Does that make sense? I’ve never explored this word in this way. You are really making me think! Like I was saying, “Hey, this is really how it is,” because you can get very wrapped up in the day-to-day activities of your life and not really allow yourself to think in an analytical way, an emotional way about how, how you’ve lived your life. And so the film gave me that chance. I realized as I was making Film About a Father Who that two things happen when you’re interviewing and when you’re trying to write.
If I’m talking to one of my siblings and I’m asking them to tell me about how they feel about something, they’re looking to me, and I’m saying, “yes, yes,” and I’m nodding, and I’m affirming as if that’ll fit perfectly into my edit, you know, [like] that’s exactly what I needed. So I found that if we went together into a very dark place, like a closet, there wasn’t that constant affirmation and perhaps, manipulation. So that’s one thing. But then the other thing had to do with the writing and the construction of a voiceover or narration was that I kept censoring myself. So I used a method that has really proven to be super helpful. That was to just record my thoughts in this kind of unfiltered way and then to send it to a transcription service. And then you come back, and you have 20 pages of text. That was how I did it since I kept writing in my moleskin diary and scratching it all out.
I know you got your start with feminist filmmaking.Seeing Film About a Father Who, I wondered was there any sort of [internal] conflict?
I was actually editing Film About a Father Who during the Me Too movement. So I was cognizant of the fact that I was talking about a man who led a life, well, he’s still alive, in which he had a certain kind of power over different women in his life. Maybe not in the workplace, but you know, in his personal life. And I knew that there were contradictions, but I felt that I was not only making it as a feminist but also as a daughter. You look at your parents as role models, but you also look at your parents for ways to be completely different.
They’re your first models of how to exist in the world and for how to define what their sexuality is—how they define the meaning of their gender. And so either you adhere to that, or you move away. And for example, in Film About a Father Who, I think my brothers were all positioning themselves in very different ways in terms of their own identity as men. I think that they were confronting those things in just as complicated ways as we as daughters were. I mean, my brother Ira said he thinks the gist of the whole movie is a kind of search for a new or refined definition for masculinity in the 2020s.
So I was trying to deal with that all the time to move between my rage at my dad, but also my attempt to forgive him or to recognize his flaws.
I also found it interesting that from the beginning of your career, you started filming people in a unique way, compared to traditional documentarians that do shot-reverse-shot and have them look at a certain place. Whereas I feel like a lot of people that you film will look right at the camera or look right at you. How did you even think to do that? Break that rule.
Oh, you really picked up on something. That happened particularly in a film called Investigation of a Flame
(a 2001 documentary by Sachs that illuminates the story of the Catonsville Nine, who were Catholic activists in 1968 who peacefully yet poignantly burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War.)
When I was shooting that film, most of it, not all of it, I shot by myself. I was shooting it, but I was also using it as an opportunity to get to know these incredible anti-war activists, people who had been fighting the fight—the good fight. And even breaking the law in an absolutely nonviolent way as a statement against the Vietnam war. So I was on my way to interviewing someone near Boston. And a friend of mine who worked for National Geographic [said to me], “How are you going to shoot that by yourself? Because where will they look?” But that’s part of a grammar, that conceit, that idea that you have to look like three-quarters off. I think it was Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, who came up with a camera which he reconfigured so that people could simultaneously look at him while he was shooting and appear to be looking off at something. He invented some form of refraction to kind of work against that formula for setting up a relationship that isn’t about that the director controlling—[even though] we know the director is controlling. I mean, one of my very favorite places to do interviews is in the car because I think when people look off at a horizon line, even if the car isn’t moving, they become very introspective. Have you ever noticed all the deep conversations you might’ve had in a car?
Yeah. No, I never thought about that. There must be something with like the horizon—
The horizon, the sort of hermetic solitude—removed from the rest of the world but not really. You’re not in a silent chamber. You’re actually watching the world go by. But people become very— what’s the word? Meditative.
I definitely remember you having a couple of interviews where a person is looking out a window, looking outside.
I’ve been criticized for that. Oh my God. I had an interview in Investigation of a Flame where I’m interviewing this man. And then I look out the window— the camera looks out the window. And a lot of people were surprised that I kept that. They said, “why didn’t you just put in ‘B-roll’?” But I actually hate the term B-roll. I can’t stand it. It’s so disrespectful of the image, but also, I wanted the shot to convey that I was listening to him. I mean, I thought it was honest. I was listening to this man so intensely that I needed to not look at him. I needed to take in what he was saying.
I think that’s so interesting that you hate that term “B-roll.” Because I definitely feel like for a lot of your films, what makes them so good is that you have like an eye for beauty in all moments. No moment is B-roll.
I think that I said it was “disrespectful to the image,” but it actually doesn’t allow for the dialogue or the voiceover to have multiple layers of meaning. It just provides a little bit of distraction. I mean, I would say if the idea of B-roll, as in filler, is all you can do, just put in black.
The attention to dialogue is evident in each of Sachs’ films. Her 2013 documentary, Your Day is My Night, documents the lives of Chinese immigrants living in Manhattan’s Chinatown. In a scene where a middle-aged man gives another a back massage, he apologizes for bringing trashed mattresses into their shared living space. He likes to clean them and give them back to people in need. Sachs cut back and forth from a close-up of his hands gingerly rubbing the other’s back to a close-up of his face as he speaks, the window reflecting in his glasses. The audible rhythm of the massage combined with the focus on the scene presented—no, B-roll—makes it feel immersive. It made me linger on every word, every sound.
Sachs cares greatly about the spoken word but also the written. Many of her films intersect both of these mediums. Her 2020 abstract short film, Girl is Presence, silently follows her daughter arranging items from shark teeth to film strips while a poem is recited as a voiceover. For this short, she collaborated with poet Anne Lesley Selcer. I thought it was intriguing that Sachs, being a documentarian who tend to concern themselves with prose-oriented storytelling, has such a strong interest in poetry. Though, it is not surprising because Sachs herself is a poet. In 2019, her first book was published, Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press) which inspired her 2017 documentary Tip of My Tongue.
I know you write poetry as well.
Yeah, I think there’s an interesting intersection between film and poetry that isn’t just about two different disciplines coming together, but it’s a way of listening. So poetry is like a confrontation with or a disruption of more conventional ways of constructing meaning, of organizing sentences. Poetry asks you to think in more associative ways and in speculative ways and redefines words you thought you knew. It asks you to listen in this kind of super-engaged way. And I also like that poetry thinks about the words in collision with each other and overlapping each other like the songs of words and even the fact that we break lines based on sound and based on rhythm, which is not how prose works. And that’s also how I like to edit, for example, dialogue in my films. I like to think about the ways that things are iterated, not just a cause and effect. Like I say this, and then you say that, and then I say this back to you. So I think poetry pushes you to engage with the oral experience in really revealing ways. I have recently, like in the last four or five years, integrated poetry more and more into my own film work, like with “Tip of My Tongue.” Then I made quite a few films in collaboration with other poets, like Bernadette Mayer or Paolo Javier.
Watching your films, I felt like there was a unique flow to the dialogue a lot of times.
One thing that’s been helpful over the years is I often shoot images separate from recording sound. So when you shoot what we call video image or digital, it’s like the sound and the picture usually, as they say, it sounds so terrible, [are] “married.” So you get the image, and you get the sound, and people tend to privilege the hearing of clear, clean sound in order to convey information. But if you let that go, you can allow dialogue to transform into sound effect. Like in conventional filmmaking, you have a track which is dialogue, a track which is effects, and a track which is music. But if you think of it all as an opportunity for dialogue to become music or for a sound effect to register almost like voice, then you start to get surprises that I think are super interesting.
That just reminded me of like- I love that opening of The Washing Society, where it was cutting to different [exteriors of] laundromats [around New York City]. I just remember watching that, and, you know, I had the volume turned up. And I felt like each laundromat, each area, had its unique sounds to it and really flowed into each one quite nicely, but then became distinct.
Thank you for saying that. In that film and about five others, I’ve worked really closely with Stephen Vitiello, who’s a wonderful sound artist and performer. We started working together on Your Day is My Night in 2013. Then he worked with me on Tip of My Tongue , Drift and Bow and Film About a Father Who. I’ll send him sounds from laundromats, then he’ll send me back musical pieces, and they’re usually much longer than the image. So then I have to find more image. And so it’s really like a back and forth the whole time. It’s never simply that he just creates the music track.
That’s the main methodology [for] him making music for your films? You’ll send him soundbites, and he’ll send you music?
Sort of. A lot of times, I’ll send him an image, and then he’ll come up with something, or he’ll say, “listen, [I] sent you all these sounds I made.” He also uses instruments. Sometimes he’ll hire a clarinet player, and then they’ll make these longer pieces, and then I love the piece so much that I think I have to meet him with more image. For me, the places where we have his music are very evocative and also places for thinking so that my films aren’t too much dialogue. I call them a sound vessels so that you can be in this place of resonance without exposition or information or anything like that, listening in a more relational way.
So, sometimes he’ll send you music, and you’ll actually respond by filming more?
Yeah. Yeah, sometimes.
I think that’s awesome.
It’s a lot of pressure, but I try to rise to the occasion.
I think in that way it makes the films breathe a little more, you know, so that you have some kind of scene where you have all this activity and energy and conversation, and then you have, a time that’s more sort of more cerebral. It’s not like a rest time. In fact, I think the audience has to kind of work with what they’ve just experienced in the previous scenes. That’s what I think happens in those sections.
Also, I see that you’re very interested in the ephemeral with a lot of your work. I’m wondering, for something as permanent a medium as film is, what is your interest in that?
Hmm, that’s really a lovely question. So, I guess I explored that most… I’m going to think about a couple of films, but I don’t know if you’ve seen them. Did you see Maya at 24?
Yes-
Maya at 24 is a four-minute short film she released in 2021, which captures her daughter, Maya, at ages 6, 16, and the titular, 24. It’s comprised almost entirely of three paralleled scenes of Maya running in circles around a camera at each of those ages. Sachs shot it in black and white film on her 16mm Bolex.
So I was thinking about this while my daughter was spinning around me and then later as I was watching those moments on film. There on the screen are aspects of her that are no more—like I can’t touch anymore, that I can’t access anymore. But film itself can remind me; it’s almost like saying film is the antidote to the ephemeral? It’s sort of saying, “well, nothing is ephemeral because we can contain it and put it in our computer or put it in a can,” but yet it is also constantly reminding us that it no longer is. Did you see a Month of Single Frames?
No, but that’s the one about Barbara Hammer?
Yeah. You know, Barbara Hammer’s work?
A little bit. I’m not too knowledgeable of her, though.
Well, she was definitely a mentor of mine and a dear friend—she was never a teacher—but I admired her. She was exactly the same age as my mom is, and she was a powerhouse, “lesbian, experimental filmmaker,” that’s what she called herself. And when she was dying, a year before that, she asked me and some other people to make films with materials she had never been able to finish. And so the film that we made, which is a Month of Single Frames, or that I made in homage to her, is also about the ephemeral because it’s a recognition of the mortal coil as well as the changing landscape that you’ll see in the film. The landscape is- has- will always change. So it’s only there to hold onto and to touch in that exact moment. It’s like the Heraclitus, you know, “you can’t step in the same [stream] twice.” And so, it is always passing us by. I’m working on a new film now called Every Contact Leaves a Trace. It’s about people who’ve left imprints on me, but that expression comes from a forensic study. That if you come into my home or space and you take something from me, you leave something of yourself, a residue. So I’m interested in that. What happens when a tangible, touch-based experience is investigated, which is sort of like, how do we confront the ephemeral?
So for that film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace. Are you trying to take like a neutral stance and pull in people that have had any sort of contact with you—negative or positive?
I actually only have a pool of 550 people.
That’s a lot, though.
But I’m not using all of them. No, I’m not. They are people who, at one point, gave me a card. We had a haptic intersection. It could be a doctor. It could be someone from like a hardware store. I have both of those types of people. I met a man on the border between the United States and Mexico, right in Tijuana. We met for about an hour. He gave me his card. So, I’m actually constructing scenarios in my mind about those. Yeah, it’s kind of similar; you said “ephemeral.” It’s like a passing in the night. That man left something with me. Maybe I left something with him. I don’t know. That happened in 2014, but I have these cards going back all the way to the ’90s. I’m interested in not so much the trajectory of their lives but in the detritus of the moment. I might do kind of playful reenactments. I’m not quite sure.
Like Lynne Sachs’ use of business cards to recall moments with strangers, near the end of the interview, I brought out stills from her films to recall scenes. The image I brought for Film About a Father Whowas one of my favorites, but the one I had the most trouble understanding. It’s the image you have seen twice thus far—Sachs’ siblings playing in a creek. I was first drawn to it by the use of color and light. Then, when I noticed she repeated it across the film it made me believe it had to hold more significance than I understood. Though, I was not prepared for how important. I said to her,
I noticed that you repeated this image in Film About a Father Who.
Oh, thank you. Okay. I love that you brought that up. What happens in Film About a Father Who is that I have a seven-minute shot that my dad recorded with his own camera. So it’s the world and his children perceived by him. In many films that one makes, you talk to people, and they tell you exactly how they feel about things. But that was really a challenge for me with my father. So, to see the world through his lens, through his eyes, was such an opportunity for me to think about the positive things that he brought to his children. I had that material, and at first, I absolutely dismissed it because it had been completely degraded by time, by the weather, by the fact that the material had been in a garage for decades. Then I looked at it again, and I realized it was the most important image in all of Film About a Father Who. Because it has this compassion, but also as an image, it’s like the classical golden triangle. It’s constructed graphically like what you’re taught in design school or in drawing class—to create this perpetual motion inward towards the center through a triangle. And so, I was interested in using that as a marker three times in the film, but it’s not exactly the same shot. It’s different parts of the same seven-minute shot. Each time you, as the viewer, have a different level of engagement. The first time the children are sort of archetypal children playing in the water. The second time you know that they’ve grown up and you’ve seen them in other places, and you’re able to have a kind of comprehensive understanding of life live; they have become thinking, engaged adults. The third time that you see it, you bring a kind of gravitas. Like these people have been through some pain. They have wisdom; they have interesting and complex interactions. So I’m interested personally in how you change as viewer because each time you see that frame, you are slightly more knowing. By the end, you’re almost omniscient, but in the beginning, you’re just engaging with it as material image.
That was so profound. I absolutely love that explanation.
It was really a reversal because I was so dismissive of that shot, and then I was so enthralled by it. There’s one other shot in Film About a Father Who that’s kind of like that. At the very end, there’s this static-y black and white shot where you only see the silhouette of my father, and he’s going off towards the horizon line. It probably was at the end of a tape and was damaged in some way. But I liked that it was pared down to these high contrasts blacks and whites, and that was it. It is my father, but it could become your father or anyone in your life you’re trying to hold onto.
You can find many of Lynne Sachs’s films on the Criterion Channel, Fandor, DAFilms and Ovid:
MAY 21: ANIMAL SPIRITS/SPIRIT ANIMALS : JOHNSON’s MANATEES + JOSH HARPER + CHRIS MARKER +
Other Cinema Cur. Craig Baldwin May 21, 2022
Continuing our wild Animal Spirits/Spirit Animals theme from last season!!..Headlining is the world premiere of local folk-naturalist Daniel Johnson‘s lushly illustrated lecture/video on the crisis facing manatees! He also unspools precious peeks of the UCB Campanile Falcon “soap opera”, as well as his ongoing Cali Condor in-person research. ALSO in the house is the apocalyptic plea of our enlightened East Bay cine-essayist Joshua Harper, with the global debut of and personal intro to his archive-rich WAR ON EARTH…
PLUS: Some time back, OC soul-sister Lynne Sachs teamed up with none Other than Chris Marker to finish their 20-min. Three Cheers for the Whale, and its delightful historical trace tonight rounds out our opening “Animal” hour. But our second half is all about humans, who inhabit animal skins, literally and figuratively, perhaps to better understand our commonalities. Andrew Shirley‘s 30-min. Wasted Land is a revelatory but under-seen work that follows 3 furies as they mark their dystopian territory via graffiti tags! Jim Trainor‘s Moschops is a faux-paleontology animation that endows invented creatures with emotional lives, and in Rainier Gels‘ Brementon Musicians, a 16mm cult clip from a children‘s matinee manages to deliver an uncannier fantasy than any mere cartoon.
AND a quarter-hour excerpt of David Attenborough beautiful Baobob eco-study, Disney‘s now infamous White Wilderness, and of course some Harryhausen beasties! Come in animal costume!!
In a cinema letter to Jean Vigo, film essayist Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of the short-lived but mightily influential French director’s sublime, dynamically inventive 1933 classic ZÉRO DE CONDUITE, in which a group of schoolboys wage an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6 assault on the United States Capitol, Sachs contemplates how innocent play or calculated protest can turn so quickly into chaos and violence.
E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2021 • United States, Spain In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, filmmaker Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic ZÉRO DE CONDUITE, in which a group of schoolboys wage an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the assault on the United States Capitol of January 6, 2021, Sachs wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can turn so quickly into chaos and violence.
Zéro de conduite Directed by Jean Vigo • 1933 • France Starring Jean Dasté, Gérard de Bédarieux, Louis Lefebvre So effervescent and charming that one can easily forget its importance in film history, Jean Vigo’s enormously influential portrait of prankish boarding-school students is one of cinema’s great acts of rebellion. Based on the director’s own experiences as a youth, ZÉRO DE CONDUITE presents childhood as a time of unfettered imagination and brazen rule-flouting. It’s a sweet-natured vision of sabotage made vivid by dynamic visual experiments—including the famous, blissful slow-motion pillow fight.
The 2022 BAMcinemaFest has officially unveiled its lineup. IndieWire can exclusively announce that Sundance breakout documentary “Aftershock” will make its New York Premiere on the opening night of the festival, which kicks off June 23 and runs through June 30.
The fully in-person event will begin with Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s critically acclaimed documentary. The film exposes the failures of the maternal healthcare system that have led to a disproportionate amount of Black women dying in childbirth. “Aftershock” won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Impact for Change at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
Fellow Sundance selection “2nd Chance” is set to make its New York Premiere, as well as breakthrough filmmaker Andrew Infante’s “Ferny and Luca,” a fresh take on the ebbs and flows of a young Brooklyn relationship.
BAMcinemaFest will also mark the world premiere of Amber Bemak’s performative documentary “100 Ways to Touch the Border,” which follows the 40-year career of radical Mexcian-Chicano artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who enacts his interventions by “queering the border,” claiming all borders as queer and liminal spaces.
The festival will take place fully in-person at BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn and will feature a blend of premieres, new restorations, along with in-person filmmaker Q&As.
New restorations of Brooklyn filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira’s debut feature “Alma’s Rainbow” (1993) and short “Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People” (1984) are slated to make their respective premieres. Both films depict multilayered glimpses into the Black woman’s world, with examinations on beauty and the pressure to conform.
Launched in 2009 as a showcase for new independent films, the annual BAMcinemaFest is an extension of BAM’s year-round film program, collecting the most innovative new work from festivals in the U.S. and around the world and bringing them to New York City audiences.
See below for the full lineup. Descriptions courtesy of the festival. Ticketing info is here.
“2nd Chance” (2022) Dir. Ramin Bahrani This critically acclaimed first documentary from Ramin Bahrani follows the life and contradictions of the man that created, and self-tested, the bulletproof vest. 89min. New York Premiere. Documentary.
“100 Ways to Touch the Border” (2022) Dir. Amber Bemak A daring, self-reflexive documentary on the extraordinary Mexican/Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s 40-year career of radical artistic practice and work in “queering the border.” 84min. World Premiere. Documentary.
“Actual People” (2021) Dir. Kit Zauhar Desperate to control something, a college grad decides to win the affections of a boy from her hometown in Kit Zauhar’s exciting, honest film by and about a young woman of color. 84min. New York Premiere. Drama.
“Aftershock” (2022) Dirs. Paula Eiselt & Tonya Lewis Lee A powerful NY-filmed documentary that shines a light on the Black women, and bereaved partners, who are failed by the U.S. maternal health system. 86 min. New York Premiere, Opening Night Film. Documentary. From Onyx Collective and ABC News, the film will stream on Hulu domestically later this Summer.
Ayoka Chenzira Retrospective New restorations of African-American filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira’s visionary work center Black womanhood. 95min. New York Premieres.
“Alma’s Rainbow” (1993) Dir. Ayoka Chenzira
Known for her socially conscious films that challenge stereotypes about Black culture, Ayoka Chenzira’s first feature film is a coming-of-age dramedy that highlights a group of middle-class Black women living in Brooklyn. As Rainbow (Platt) enters womanhood and navigates her own experiences around beauty standards, self-image, and the rights of Black women over their own bodies, her pragmatic mother Alma Gold (Weston-Moran) and free-spirited aunt Ruby Gold (Kirby) disagree on the “proper” direction for Rainbow’s life. In this multi-layered Black woman’s world, Rainbow, Alma, and Ruby wrestle with love and what it means to exert and exercise their own agency. New restoration!
“Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People” (1984) Dir. Ayoka Chenzira In this satirical short, Chenzira utilizes mixed media and animation to unpack the stereotypes associated with Black hair while critiquing the limits of the European beauty standard. She draws attention to the physical pain Black women endure to straighten their hair, and the emotional pain that comes as a result of the pressure to conform. New restoration!
“Chee$e” (2022) Dir. Damian Marcano An award-winning breakout debut by up-and-coming director Damian Marcano about a young father’s eccentric scheme to sell weed. 105 min. New York Premiere. Comedy/Drama.
“Crows Are White” (2022) Dir. Ahsen Nadeem A filmmaker searches for answers in a strict Buddhist monastery and at the bottom of a sundae in this doc-existential comedy. 97min. New York Premiere. Documentary.
“Ferny & Luca” (2021) Dir. Andrew Infante An award-winning lo-fi rom-com, shot in Brooklyn, that follows the hot and cold relationship of a naive pretty boy and a rough and tumble disco queen. 70min. New York Premiere. Comedy/Drama.
“Free Chol Soo Lee” (2022) Dirs. Julie Ha & Eugene Yi This extraordinary portrait of community activism follows the wrongful conviction of Chol Soo Lee and the complex legacy—and human cost—of becoming the symbol of a movement. 83min. New York Premiere. Documentary.
“Happer’s Comet” (2022) Dir. Tyler Taormina Filmed on the weekends across four months during 2020, Tyler Taormina cast his own Long Island family and neighbors in the delicate cinematic meditation on late-night life, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. Taormina takes the audience through the nightly routines of suburban residents as they clean their offices, meet their lovers, apply make-up before going out, and rollerblade around town. Dreamlike, gentle, and strangely ominous, this sensory series of vignettes “is a hypnotic ode to the night owl” (The Film Stage). 62min. New York Premiere. Drama.
“The Last Days of August” (2022) Dir. Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck & Robert Machoian From prairie towns in Nebraska to the quiet nightlife of suburban Long Island, these visually stunning films capture the quiet essence of humanity. 13min. Screening with HAPPER’S COMET.
“Nothing Lasts Forever” (2022) Dir. Jason Kohn Jason Kohn pushes the documentary into thriller territory with this riveting investigation of the secretive diamond industry. 87min. New York Premiere. Documentary.
Shorts Program 1 “When There Was Water” (2022) Dir. Nicole Otero A lyrical exploration of family, loss, connection and nature. 15 min.
“The Feeling of Being Close to You” (2022) Dir. Ash Goh Hua This autobiographical film documents an attempt at healing the trauma of touch between mother and child, as the filmmaker and their mother talk openly for the first time about the intergenerational trauma and abuse within their lives. Present-day phone conversations are juxtaposed with archival VHS footage, creating a connection between the past and a re-write for the future. 12min.
“Portal” (2022) Dir. Rodney Evans During the pandemic, two queer BIPOC friends sustain each other through communication and connection in this short non-fiction film about the lack of touch for single people catalyzed by Covid-19. 12min
“When It’s Good, It’s Good” (2022) Dir. Alejandra Vasquez When she returns to rural West Texas to document the effects of the boom-and-bust nature of the oil industry on her hometown, the filmmaker unexpectedly captures the political transformation that takes place in her family over five years and two election cycles. 16 min.
“Winn” (2022) Dir. Joseph East & Erica Tanamachi From activists fighting for the rights of incarcerated pregnant people to singles searching for touch during the pandemic, these shorts focus on family, connection, and trauma. 17min.
Shorts Program 2
“Shut Up and Paint” (2022) Dir. Titus Kaphar & Alex Mallis Winner of the Best Short prize at the 2022 Big Sky Documentary Film Festiva, Shut Up and Paint follows the painter Titus Kaphas as he turns to film when the art world tries to silence his voice. 20min.
“The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms” (2022) Dir. Eloise Sherrid An experimental documentary collaboration between myself, Samuel Geiger, and Lauryn Welch. The film is a window into Sam’s experience living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a painful connective tissue disorder that limits his mobility and functionality. 10min.
“Swerve” (2022) Dir. Lynne Sachs with Poetry by Paolo Javier A food market and playground in Queens, NY becomes the site for this film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica—a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next—as five New York City performers speak in verse while wandering through food stalls in search of a new sensation. 8min. World Premiere.
“Udeyonv (What They’ve Been Taught)” (2022) Dir. Brit Hensel Filmed on the Qualla Boundary and Cherokee Nation, ᎤᏕᏲᏅ (Udeyonv) (What They’ve Been Taught) explores expressions of reciprocity in the Cherokee world, brought to life by an elder and a first language speaker. Premiering at Sundance, the documentary circles the intersection of tradition, language, land, and a commitment to maintaining balance. 9 min.
“The Fire This Time” (2022) Dir. Mariam Ghani A selection of formally inventive short films ask questions about art and history. 26min.
“Sirens” (2022) Dir. Rita Baghdadi Moroccan-American filmmaker Rita Baghadi captures the unexpected, uplifting behind-the-scenes story of the Middle East’s first all-female thrash metal band. 78 min. New York Premiere. Documentary.
“The Unknown Country” (2022) Dir. Morrisa Maltz| In this narrative/documentary hybrid, Lily Gladstone stars as a grieving woman traveling to the Texas-Mexico border to reunite with her Oglala Lakota family. 85min. New York Premiere. Drama.
We’re thrilled to finally announce the screening line-ups for our inaugural Canyon Cinema Discovered programs, which will debut this fall in San Francisco and online. Stay tuned for details!
Prime Time Reverie Curated by Aaditya Aggarwal
From cosmetic commercials to women-led talk shows to narrative melodrama, television catered to feminized viewers is a formally diverse genre, nudging, socializing, and mirroring its spectators in intimate and discerning ways. Capturing the urgent, anchoring spirit of prime time telecasts, Prime Time Reverie stages a fragmented history of television as a women’s medium. The works in this program engage multiple tides of broadcasting, from soapy to confessional, from sensationalist to documentarian. Weaving an absent or corporeal presence through each work, televised portrayals of womanhood—hermetic, large, versatile—incite daydreams among a mass populace, flirting with histories of technology, desire, and visuality.
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (Cauleen Smith, 1992)
No No Nooky TV (Barbara Hammer, 1987)
Removed (Naomi Uman, 1999)
Waiting for Commercials (Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, 1966-72, 1992)
No Land (Emily Chao, 2019)
MTV Artbreak (Dara Birnbaum, 1986)
Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (Dara Birnbaum, 1979)
That Woman (Sandra Davis, 2018)
10:28,30 (Paige Taul, 2019)
Still Life with a Woman and Four Objects (Lynne Sachs, 1986)
Playing in the Dark: Watery Experiments
Curated by Chrystel Oloukoï Playing in the Dark engages the various ways in which blackness haunts the sea and is haunted by the sea. Borrowing from Toni Morrison, “playing in the dark” references the subdued Africanist presence which mediates imaginations of water in the wake of variegated yet entangled transoceanic slave trades but also takes seriously darkness as a subversive ecological milieu, against lures of transparency. In the works gathered here, nothing is left untouched by the confounding qualities of water and its corrosive opacities, from bodies to the environment, to the materiality of film itself. As such, “playing in the dark” also references attempts in Black experimental filmmaking to chart paths in which cameras do not write with light but probe shadows in search of “an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation).
By the Sea (Toney W. Merritt, 1982)
What the Water Said Nos. 1-3 (David Gatten, 1998)
Aqua (Samba Félix N’diaye, 1989)
The Dislocation of Amber (Hussein Shariffe, 1975)
Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (Ja’Tovia Gary, 2017)
Pattaki (Everlane Moraes, 2019)
What the Water Said Nos. 4-6 (David Gatten, 2006-07)
Towards the Colonies (Miryam Charles, 2016)
Song for the New World (Miryam Charles, 2021)
Trajectories of Self-Determination: Experimental Cinema’s Embrace of Jazz
Curated by Juan Carlos Kase
Experimental cinema has long embraced American vernacular music as a generative model, whether it supplied a formal template, an affective inspiration, or a point of cultural reference. From the collective polyphony of Charles Mingus’ kinetic ensembles to the gale and squall of Joe McPhee’s storming cornet, the improvisational energies of jazz – as well as blues and other popular-modernist musics – have continued to inspire American avant-garde filmmakers. Collectively, the films in this program explore the myriad ways in which experimental cinema has drawn from African-American improvised music and embraced its spontaneous, collaborative, polyrhythmic, and lyrical energies.
Insurgent Articulations
Curated by Ekin Pinar
A strong interest in the social, political, and cultural contexts has always been part and parcel of a good variety of experimental filmmaking practices, even though canonical works on experimental cinema tend to focus solely on the formal explorations that supposedly reflect the filmmaker’s own (hermetic) subjectivity. Because of this exclusive focus on formal experimentation, the socio-historical, cultural, and representational politics, ethics, and concerns of much experimental work remained unnoticed until recently. Focusing on the theme of the aesthetics of socio-political unrest and protest, this program showcases examples of experimental filmmaking that fictionally constructed or experimentally reconstructed in formally explorative and reflexive ways demonstrations, rallies, marches, and sit-ins.
Pig Power (Single Spark Films, 1969)
Demonstration ’68 (Dominic Angerame, 1968-74)
Solidarity (Joyce Wieland, 1973)
Sisters! (Barbara Hammer, 1973)
New Left Note (Saul Levine, 1968-82)
Gay Power, 1971/2007/2012 (Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett, and The Women’s Liberation Cinema, 2012)
On the nature of the bone (Elena Pardo, 2018)
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message (Rhea Storr, 2018)
Opening reception: Friday, May 27, 6-9 PM | Barbara Hammer, Brydie O’Connor and Lynne Sach’s film schedule will be posted during the exhibition in “Happenings”. Art Market Provincetown http://www.artmarketprovincetown.com/art/20220527/
Barbara Hammer | Selected Films, Photographs, Drawings & Collages, along with Films by Brydie O’ Connor & Lynne Sachs
Many thanks to Florrie Burke and Louky Keijsers Koning for their support and collaboration on this exhibtion of Barbara Hammer’s works.
All works are Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Company gallery, New York.
Barbara Hammer often said that she had three great loves- art, nature and me. Her time in the dune shack was thrilling for her and she would be gratified that her work has come full circle to land here at AMP in Provincetown. The natural beauty of the Cape has inspired so many-Hammer among them. She loved its’ winds, sand and waves. It is fitting that the waters off Provincetown are her final resting place as she swims with the whales. — Florrie Burke
Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), known for her groundbreaking films that celebrated female sexuality began filming in the 1970s, the decade she called “that glorious time of feminist ideals and lesbian bed-hopping.” It was also the time, after a yearlong trip around the world on a motor scooter, that she decided to be an artist. She enrolled in a painting course taught by abstract expressionist William Morehouse, who saw such movement in Hammer’s paintings that he encouraged her to experiment with film. It was the start of her new life: as filmmaker, single woman, and lesbian—a word she’d never heard until the age of 30.
“When I made love with a woman for the first time my entire worldview shifted,” Hammer said. “In addition to the sensual pleasures, my social network completely changed; I was swept up with the energies and dreams of a feminist revolution.” Hammer made 29 films in the 1970s, many of which reflected her exploration of sex and identity, like Multiple Orgasm, 1976 and Dream Age from 1979.
Hammer’s artistic output wasn’t limited to film only, she took her sketchbooks and photo camera everywhere she went, which resulted in intimate drawing as well as playful and performative photographs, like the BH Gestallt series, which will be on view among a selection of drawings.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the time of Reagan, AIDS, and heightened LGBT activism, Hammer’s films blended feminist politics, lesbian erotica, and social comment. No No Nooky TV (1987), one of the films on display confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface.
In the 2000s Barbara Hammer’s output slowed down, as she focused on feature films. However, in the last 13 years of her life she published an autobiography, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life and created 7 new films as well as a digital rendering of a selection of her sketchbook drawings, titled Lesbian Whale (2015).
Hammer’s work is held in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne. Her complete catalogue of 16 and 8mm film, as well as Super 8, is in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles, and her papers are available for review at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven.
During her lifetime she created two awards for lesbian and queer filmmakers, and had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York mounted a retrospective of her film, photography, drawings, and sculpture, which New York Times art critic Holland Cotter named one of the best exhibitions of that year.
(The above text is based on a text written by Andrew Durbin and Susan Champlin)
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Brydie O’ Connor | Documentary film: Love, Barbara
Love, Barbara is short (15 min.) documentary about the iconic legacy of pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, through the lens and love of her partner of over 30 years, Florrie Burke.
Brydie O’Conner is a Kansas-bred, New York based filmmaker.
Her award-winning work spans the documentary and narrative fields with a focus on women-driven and queer stories. Brydie has directed short documentaries LOVE, BARBARA (2021) which premiered at Academy Award-qualifying Santa Barbara International Film Festival and FRIENDS OF DOROTHY (2020), which premiered in New York at DOC NYC. In 2021, Brydie was selected for The Future of Film is Female Award, and she received a NYSCA grant sponsored by Women Make Movies in addition to a Brooklyn Arts Council grant. In 2019-2020, she workshopped her forthcoming film in the Female Filmmakers Berlin Directing Lab. Much of her work is inspired by archival histories.
Brydie’s producing credits include THE LESBIAN BAR PROJECT with Executive Producer Lea DeLaria, WOMONTOWN for PBS Kansas City, and she has archival produced Season 7 of THE CIRCUS on Showtime in addition to various projects on Left/Right TV’s roster. She is a graduate of The George Washington University.
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Lynne Sachs | Films: A Month of Single Frames & Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor
A Month of Single Frames (Made with and for Barbara Hammer; 14 min. color sound 2019): “In the last few months of filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s life, she asked me to come to her home to discuss something she needed to say in person. I immediately faced a complicated set of emotions. 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. As I sat at her side, 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 there, 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.” While writing the text for my own film, the words I placed on the screen came to me in a dream. I quickly realized that this kind of oneiric encounter could become a posthumous continuation of the dialogue I had started with Barbara. 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. 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.”
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital, 9 minutes, 2018): From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
Lynne Sachs is an experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn. She has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems. Working from a feminist perspective, she investigates connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. She uses letters, archives, diaries, poetry and music, to take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Over the years, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel/ Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Lynne’s films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival.
AMP is a live contemporary gallery space dedicated to exhibiting multi-disciplined work by visual, conceptual, performance artists, filmmakers and writers. Exhibitions & Happenings are primarily cutting-edge, and often process-based.
2022 features Martin R. Anderson, Shez Arvedon, Midge Battelle, Susan Bernstein, Mx Justin Vivian Bond, Terry Boutelle, Linda Leslie Brown, Bobby Busnach, Karen Cappotto, Jamie Casertano, Barbara E. Cohen, Liz Collins, Anne Corrsin, Jeanne-Marie Crede, Jay Critchley, Katrina del Mar, Phyllis Ewen, Lola Flash, Kathi Robinson Frank, Barbara Hadden, Barbara Hammer, Michelle Handelman, Heather Kapplow, Jackie Lipton, Shari Kadison, Zehra Khan, David Macke, Jade McGleughlin, Zammy Migdal, Bobby Miller, Pasquale Natale, Alice O’Malley, Pat Place, Mark Rosenthal, Marian Roth, Nancy Rubens, Jicky Schnee, Lori Swartz, Christopher Tanner, Gail Thacker, Judith Trepp, Suara Welitoff, Forrest Williams, Rick Wrigley & others.
JP Art Market, AMP’s independent sister gallery created by artist Patti Hudson has long been an integral contributor to the Boston arts community showing work by emerging and established, local and international artists such as Kristen Dodge, Leslie Hall, Lisa King, Roger Miller, and Patti Smith.
AMP Gallery, 432 Commercial Street, Provincetown MA 02657 | Mail: PO Box 807
This year marks the second installment of Prismatic Ground (May 4 – May 8), a new festival focusing on experimental documentary and avant-garde film and video. Last year’s inaugural edition was a completely virtual affair, but this year the festival returns in a hybrid version with in-person screenings and online viewing available for most of the films in its impressive 14 programs. Co-presented by the Maysles Documentary Center and Screen Slate, Prismatic Ground brings festival-goers a wide range of politically engaged, formally challenging new work by up-and-coming artists alongside established ones like Bill Morrison, Jodie Mack, and this year’s Ground Glass Award recipient, Christopher Harris. In the world of experimental film where visibility and opportunities to premiere new work can be hard to come by, the festival is poised to make a significant splash.
Founded by Inney Prakash in 2021, last year’s edition consisted of four programs of films, as well as a program devoted to its first Ground Glass Award recipient, the avant-garde filmmaker and experimental documentarist Lynne Sachs. The festival honored Sachs, whose career has spanned some three decades, for her sustained contribution to experimental film. In her recent breakthrough film, Film About A Father Who, Sachs collaged decades worth of home movies and new interviews to craft a film about her father, his secret life, and its impact on the people surrounding him (namely Sachs and her siblings). Work like this—intimate, engaged, and formally daring with a documentary slant—similarly characterizes Prismatic Ground’s continued curatorial mission.
“What an honor it was for me to be given the first annual Ground Glass award.” Sachs wrote via email. Sachs was quick to mention the excitement she felt surrounding the new festival’s place in the landscape of experimental film, writing, “Something altogether surprising happened when Prismatic Ground opened its virtual curtains to the world in 2021. People from all over the globe were watching and writing about experimental, underground, international, radical, poetic, and personal cinema in numbers none of us could ever have imagined. Film festivals across the globe have always been nourished by the elite aura of inaccessibility. With Prismatic Ground, those days are over.”
This year’s Ground Glass award recipient is Christopher Harris, graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000, and has spent years as an educator (this writer counts himself as one of his proud former students) and continues to make challenging and meticulous films, like his most well known work, 2004’s haunting and powerful Reckless Eyeballing (its title taken from a Jim Crow-era prohibition on Black men looking at white women), which uses reappropriated footage from D.W. Griffith’s racist epic Birth of a Nation as well as from Foxy Brown to explore the gaze and Black identity in a cinematic context. The filmmaker, who is now the head of film and video production at the University of Iowa, says recognition of his work is welcome. “It’s been a slow build, kind of a slow burn situation,” Harris said. “now it’s even sweeter to have the recognition after just grinding away on my work overtime.” But Harris is quick to add: “I’m more eager and energized to make work now than ever before. So the timing is really great because it just helps to re-energize the passion that’s already there.”
Dreams Under Confinement, Harris’ contribution to this year’s Prismatic Ground, showcases his resolve. The short video, made using Google Earth images, street view, and audio from a police band radio, is the filmmaker’s first all digital work. “This is the first thing I’ve ever made that does not have any analog materials involved,” Harris said. “I’ve never worked this way. But for this work, it was right. For me, whatever materials are used, there has to be an internal logical justification for those materials. I’m not going to use them as if it’s a neutral format and it’s just a content-delivery medium. I don’t treat materials that way.“
The artist’s latest work finds the horror and beauty in the panopticon; surveillance materials create a fugitive, exhilarating race through digital images of Chicago, as the voices of police officers pursuing a suspect frantically blast through static on the soundtrack. Eventually the video’s frenzied journey stops short at the impenetrable walls of Chicago’s Cook County Detention Center. The viewer sees the clouds above as the audio shifts from shrill shouting to peaceful ambience. In a frenetic work about the police, violence, and the racist carceral state, it’s a poignant moment of profound transcendence and tragic wonder. Harris’ approach, with its daring ambition and inherent artistic riskiness, seems to reflect the adventurous spirit found in the best of the festival’s programming.
Referred to as “waves,” Prismatic Ground’s programs are organized on a loose thematic basis rather than by running time or region of origin. Program titles, like “memory of a memory,” “to report an incident,” “touch me don’t touch me,” and “love as cry of anguish,” are often, if not always, taken from one of the program’s films. The monikers are both specific and flexible enough to create a poetically evocative space for a variety of aesthetics, subjects, and approaches.
Wave 1, titled “look at that round ass shit,” takes its name from Sim Hahahah’s Memory Playthrough in which rapid, fragmented narration and early PC game-like graphics work together to create a sarcastic video poem. The video, which clocks in under two minutes, is a splash of brief but biting reflection on personal stories, the reality of the perceived world, and the medium itself. It’s a playful but incisive opening salvo for the program.
In G. Anthony Svatek’s Global Fruit, 16mm photography gives the short a timeless feel. The images of globally sourced fruit covered with the frost of a New York city blizzard create a clear and dynamic visual metaphor. With both Svatek and Hahahah’s films, the image of the globe (both figuratively and literally) emerges, and the program’s thematic concept begins to take shape.
Also in the program, Experimental filmmaker and animator Jodie Mack’s Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons is filled with grotesque images of biomatter undergoing a timelapse transformation. The subjects are organic but the rhythm of the piece is smooth and deliberate. There is something funerary about the flowers and plants we see, and their possible thaw or submersion has visceral impact, evoking cellular happenings on a larger scale. The (possible) thawing we witness rhymes nicely with the frosted fruit of Global Fruit and continues wave 1’s theme in an albeit more (welcomely) obtuse way.
Wave 2, titled “wings,” focuses on identity. Paige Taul’s Goat is a sweet ode to a pair of Air Jordan’s and the woman who wears them. Black and white photography shows detailed images of a basketball net, a woman’s hair, and her sunglasses, as a voice unhurriedly narrates a description of her shoes and her feelings about them. Yashaddai Owens’ D’Homme A Homme is a fun 8mm exploration of proud Blackness and masculinity set to hip hop. Filled with exuberant and memorable images, it has a decidedly vintage feel with a modern sonic twist.
Iván Reina Ortiz’s autoethnography, a filmic meditation on sexual orientation, gender, art, and personal history, continues wave 6’s theme in both a reflective and reflexive way. The artist mixes potent poetic imagery with, somewhat less effective, home video footage. Ortiz’s self-interviewing leads to the film’s most powerful moment. We see an image of the filmmaker’s bare chest with the shadow of a hand moving across it, attempting to grasp it in some way, the film’s earlier questioning about the place of the body on screen materializing into visual substance.
While Prismatic Ground does boast a feature length centerpiece, the excellent and unsettling essay film Nuclear Family, the waves seem to uniquely represent the festival’s novel, surprise- filled approach. Wave 4 features Razah AlSalah’s gloriously transcendent Canada Park, a playfully ethereal exploration of both the flatness and three dimensionality of street view imagery from off the beaten path. The narration seems to be from the perspective of the all-seeing digital camera and its (seemingly) unlimited purview. But quickly the cheap, halting imagery of the park becomes pure form and color melting before the viewer’s eyes. The representational digital images reveal themselves for what they really are—the malleable data behind their mundane facades. It’s an elegant variation on glitch set to a swelling synth that lifts the imagery from the practical to the profound as we “see” as the machine “sees.” When representational images of trees and fields return, the viewer seems to soar over them in golden light through space and possibility, seeing beyond mere landscape. But all the while the piece pushes up against the limits of digital imagery, sometimes zooming into its furthest reaches and encountering flatness. The film seems to joyfully revel in its idiosyncratic oscillations and the viewer can’t help but be swept away by it.
Other festival highlights include Gloria Chung’s True Places from wave 5, in which hazy, impressionistic landscapes seen from an airplane window are slowed and abstracted as a calm voice narrates. The words come from a New Yorker article about the changing landscape of Indigenous arctic hunters and the cumulative feeling is mournful but curious. Wave 6 includes cherry brice jr.’s This Is A Pornographic Film–or,goodbyetoArt, a sparse and delicately photographed film in which men masturbate. The images we see are a collection of details: mouths, chests, arms, and close-ups of the surrounding room. There are some candid conversations as well as a more pointed one about high art that serves as, perhaps, a counterpoint to some of the more mundane and graphic images we see. It’s a small, intimate work of the everyday with dual dimensions of irony and candor.
Wave 6, “touch me don’t touch me,” takes its name from Rhea Storr’s Madness Remixed. The film is a well-composed combination of what appears to be single frame abstraction, glitches, and photographs. A few key moments of spoken audio connect what we are seeing, including the film’s images of Josephine Baker, to the issue of cultural appropriation and exploitation of Black bodies in labor and images. The message echoes a slogan seen on signs in various forms during the George Floyd uprising: you love Black culture but not Black people. It’s an impressive mix of formalism and explicit political meaning.
In Edgar Jorge Baralt’s A Thousand Years Ago, from wave 10, images have double lives. We see the world as it is, but the film’s conceit posits what we are seeing as the world that was, the narration reflecting back on what we see from a possible future. Poetic images take on a double meaning as well. An image of the sun reflecting on water evokes the sepia tones of a sonogram. The narration muses on the origins of life long, long ago, as we watch the shape of light on the water resembling the grainy image of a fetus.
Baralt, whose previous film, the gentle Ventana, screened in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Berlinale Shorts in 2021, said in a conversation of his most recent film, “I felt the impulse to make this film after reading Mario Benedetti’s semi-autobiographical novel, Andamios. I didn’t set out to adapt this novel at all, but it helped me arrive at this framework by which to look at the present and all of its spiraling contingencies.” About the film’s use of everyday images for expansive fictive purposes, he explained, “I’ve always admired filmmakers whose raw material is ‘the everyday.’ I think it gets to an essential aspect of my fascination with cinema both as filmmaker and audience: the questioning of what reality is. What we take for granted, what we choose to look at, and what we choose to believe about it all.”
As far as being included in Prismatic Ground’s 2022 edition, Baralt is thrilled, saying, “Aside from the programs being filled with filmmakers whose work I love, I sense an enthusiasm from the programming team for reimagining what a festival is and how it’s experienced.” What Prismatic Ground is adding to the world of experimental cinema is essential and exciting, and in Baralt’s words, “It means everything. Whenever you read about the state of cinema these days, it is all doom and gloom stories of an industry in decay. So it is in these alternative outlets that you see resilience and passion. It’s always inspiring to see work bursting with possibilities, attempting to redefine what cinema can be for the years to come.” To quote the filmmaker’s new work, Prismatic Ground is a spark “illuminating the emptiness.”
Prismatic Ground runs May 4 – 8, 2022 online and in various locations around New York.