Ann Arbor Awards
March 2021
Learn more about the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award Here: https://www.aafilmfest.org/barbara
https://www.aafilmfest.org/59-awards

The Ann Arbor Film Festival provides direct support to filmmakers. Our 2021 awards competition presents $23,000 to filmmakers through cash and in-kind awards that include film stock, film processing, and camera rental. The three jurors Thorsten Fleisch, Lynn Loo, and Sheri Wills will virtually attend the six-day festival, viewing 116 films in competition and awarding the cash and in-kind awards. In addition, each juror will present a specially curated program of work during the festival. This year we are pleased to announce the addition of two more awards, the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award and the Best Experimental Animation Award! 

Many thanks to our awards donors. These valued donors make it possible for the Ann Arbor Film Festival to present awards to deserving filmmakers each year. Their generosity creates a positive impact on experimental film by providing support and recognition for talented artists. 

An award from the AAFF not only confers prestige and financial support but also can qualify filmmakers for an Oscar® nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the short film category. Qualifying awards include the Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival, the Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film, and the Lawrence Kasdan Award for Best Narrative Film. Find a full list of the awards below. 

Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award – $500

Barbara Hammer was a filmmaker with a profound commitment to expressing a feminist point-of-view in her work. In 2020, filmmaker Lynne Sachs received the Oberhausen Film Festival Grand Prize for a film she made with and for Hammer. With funds from the prize, Lynne created this Ann Arbor Film Festival award for a work that best conveys Hammer’s passion for celebrating and examining the experiences of women. Qualifying work by artists of any gender will be considered.

Somewhere Else
March 2021
By Caroline Veunac
https://www.somewhereelse.fr/film/barbara-hammer-somewhere-else/

Somewhere Else and Dulac Cinémas join forces to offer you a weekly selection of films, accompanied by animations to feed your screening. This week on Somewhere Else, we’re going to meet the filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who is the subject of two short films to be seen at the moment on the MUBI platform, Vever (for Barbara) and A Month of Single Frames.

She’s not Lillian Gish’s granddaughter
Don’t be fooled by her Wikipedia page: Barbara Hammer is not the direct descendant of the silent movie star. His maternal grandmother was actually the cook for the director of Birth of a Nation.DW Griffith, which allowed little Barbara, born in Hollywood in 1939, to once cross the path of the muse of the filmmaker, Lillian Gish. Having become a director herself in the 1970s, Barbara Hammer has often claimed the influence of her grandmother – who was not only a cordon bleu, but also a self-taught painter – on her artistic vocation. Perhaps the fairy Gish also transmitted to her a little of her pioneering spirit, she whose delicate face embodied the dawn of cinema, but who did not stop at inspiring male directors, since she was also director and screenwriter. In 1920, at the age of 27, the beautiful actress directed her own film, Remodeling Your Husband., a comedy about a woman struggling with an unfaithful husband. Barbara Hammer had two more when she shot her first short, White Cassandra , in 1968, an assemblage of aerial shots of Los Angeles rooftops and a hippie ranch in the countryside, synthesizing her childhood legacy. Hollywood woman and her aspiration for an alternative lifestyle.

She is a pioneer of female gaze
In 1975, the film theorist Laura Mulvey theorized the concept of male gaze , to characterize the way in which the staging of the vast majority of films, governed by the male norm, objectifies the body of women. At the same time, Barbara Hammer breaks the prevailing rule by making short films in which she naturally adopts what we would now call a female gaze  : a way of filming that seeks to restore the female experience in its subjectivity. At the time when the young Californian multi-graduate (of psychology, literature and cinema) launches out in the direction, she has just left her husband (”  an extraordinary type ») To assert his homosexuality: this double movement of liberation is the very source of his cinema, which will not cease, in 80 films, to seek to represent the different facets of a lesbian life until then taboo.

Riding her motorbike, with a super-8 camera as her only baggage, Barbara Hammer combines the heritage of Kerouac and the beat generation in a feminine way , drawing a new silhouette as an independent director. But her daring does not lie only in her attitude, it is also manifested in her subjects: in 1974, she changes history with Dyketactics, considered the first lesbian film, which stages sexuality between women with solar sensuality. The innovation is also formal: influenced by Maya Deren, a great figure of surrealist cinema of the 1940s, Barbara Hammer multiplies visual experiments, overprints, overexposure, collages, coloring, alterations of the film … These effects combine to create a universe of new sensations and joyful exultations, experienced and represented by a woman.

She is an archivist of the LGBT cause
Barbara Hammer’s commitment is not only artistic: it is also historical and militant. With them, the three are inseparable. In 1992, the now fifty-year-old filmmaker directed Nitrate Kisses , her first feature film, a documentary on the repression of the LGBTQ community since the First World War. This film, which retains the experimental form specific to the artist’s work, is the first part of a trilogy on the invisibility of gays and lesbians through time. In the second, Tender Fictions(1995), she tries her hand at the register of autobiography, combining family films, photos and interviews to reconstruct snippets of childhood and key moments in her adult life, like the first time that she heard the word “lesbian”, and understood that it applied to her. Then comes History Lessons (2000), where the director tells the queer story by diverting various archival images, ranging from Hollywood melodies to pornographic films, including educational, advertising and medical spots. This Invisible Histories Trilogy, which testifies to a systemic oppression while freeing the spirits by its creativity, shows the at the same time disruptive and inclusive side of the work of Barbara Hammer, which will inspire all the generation of New Queer Cinema in the 90s, from Todd Haynes to Lisa Chodolenko.

She prepared her artistic testament
The cancer that struck Barbara Hammer in 2006 would mark her work as an artist during the last years of her life, until her death in 2019, at the age of 79. Invested in the fight for the right to die with dignity, the filmmaker, supported by her partner Florrie Burke, makes illness a new opportunity to explore her sensitive experience of the world in a female body, even if it is to badly. In 2008, in A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, it compares the fight against cancer and the energizing beauty of nature. Ten years later, seeing the end coming, Barbara Hammer confides in her friend, director Lynne Sachs, 16mm images and newspaper fragments brought back from an artist residency she had spent on Cape Cod ten years. earlier, and asks him to make a movie of it: it will be A Month Of Single Frames (to be discovered now on MUBI), a sensory short film which links creativity to the feeling of loneliness and to the intensity of the relationship with the elements – landscape, sky, sea, wind – in which Barbara Hammer will soon recast. The following year, it was another director friend, Deborah Stratman, who, at her request, edited rushes shot during a trip to Guatemala in 1975, associated with quotes from Maya Deren, giving birth to another short film. Vever (for Barbara)(also on MUBI). This sororal work of continuation of her work extends beyond her death, through the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, a grant created by her in 2017 to promote the work of young lesbian directors, which has already rewarded the Miatta artists. Kawinzi in 2018 and Alli Logout in 2019.

Film Rezensionen
A Month of Single Frames
By Rouven Linnarz
Saturday, March 27 2021
https://www.film-rezensionen.de/2021/03/a-month-of-single-frames/

Rough Translation from German

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.

Wexner Center for the Arts
by Melissa Starker, Creative Content & PR Manager
Mar 26, 2021
https://wexarts.org/read-watch-listen/living-legacy-barbara-hammer?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=rf210329blog-livinglegacy

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.

Watch now on MUBI. (subscription required; free trial available)

Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award

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.” 

Learn more from the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Remembering Barbara Hammer in Japan

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.

Hear more from Sachs, Street, and Stratman about collaborating with Hammer.

Deborah Stratman and Lynne Sachs pay loving tribute to Barbara Hammer and experiment with the collaborative nature of cinema.

Sophia Satchell-Baeza•12 MAR 2021
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/nitrate-homages-to-barbara-hammer

The series Ways of Seeing with Barbara Hammer starts on MUBI on March 8, 2021 in many countries.

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.