The new film festival Prismatic Ground has put together a terrific inaugural online slate, featuring Lynne Sachs, Bill Morrison, Fox Maxy, and more.
From The Ring (2021), dir. Bill Morrison (image courtesy Prismatic Ground)
I’ve “attended” my fair share of virtual film festivals over the course of this past year, but none has put together an experience as unique and exciting as Prismatic Ground. Founded by Inney Prakash, and hosted through a partnership between Screen Slate and the Maysles Documentary Center, this is the inaugural year for the experimental documentary festival. Though it’s a small, new operation, Prakash and his collaborators have assembled an impressive lineup of films, featuring both new directors and veterans like Bill Morrison, Anand Patwardhan, and Ericka Beckman.
The main program is divided into four “waves,” with the shorts and features grouped around shared themes like colonialism and desire. Films previously featured in Hyperallergic include Maat Means Land, Still Processing, and various works by Lynne Sachs (who is the recipient of the festival’s inaugural Ground Glass Award, honoring her contributions to experimental film). All films in the waves and the Sachs program are available to stream for free, worldwide, for the duration of the festival. The centerpiece and closing night programs will be streaming live via Screen Slate’s Twitch channel at 8 pm EDT on April 15 and 18, respectively. Various panel discussions with the filmmakers will also be streamed live periodically throughout the rest of the fest.
“By the time I was about one quarter of the way through the book, I was having my own ‘Flaherty experience’: off-site, solo, thirsty for the hubbub, and yet readerly, enriching, and complex.”
Janet Walker
Flash Flaherty,the much-anticipated follow-up volume to The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, offers a people’shistory of the world-renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an annual event where participants confront and reimagine the creative process surrounding multiple document/documentary forms and modes of the moving image.
This collection, which includes a mosaic of personal recollections from attendees of the Flaherty Seminar over a span of more than 60 years, highlights many facets of the “Flaherty experience.” The memories of the seminarians reveal how this independent film and media seminar has created a lively and sometimes cantankerous community within and beyond the institutionalized realm of American media culture. Editors Scott MacDonald and Patricia R. Zimmermann have curated a collective polyphonic account that moves freely between funny anecdotes, poetic impressions, critical considerations, poignant recollections, scholarly observations, and artistic insights.
Together, the contributors to Flash Flaherty exemplify how the Flaherty Seminar propels shared insights, challenging debates, and actual change in the world of independent media.
Lynne Sachs, “Refractions”
“I was 23 years old when I attended my first Flaherty Seminar as a fellow in 1984.
I’d never taken a cinema studies class. I was just beginning to figure out how film could become the place to bring together my love for art and politics.
With hindsight in my pocket, I can see that meeting the artists and scholars that programmer D. Marie Grieco convened that summer was one of my life’s most influential experiences.
Collage-cinema genius Bruce Conner showed his work. I saw Conner’s A Movie [1958], Cosmic Ray [1969], and Crossroads [1976]. Scholar VéVé Clark presented her newly published book The Legend of Maya Deren, Vol. 1, Part 1: Signatures (1917-1942), a monumental collection of Deren’s writings. And I saw Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time [1946] and A Study in Choreography for the Camera: Out-takes [1945]. I was hooked. Forever changed.
The next year, I moved to San Francisco and began a one-year internship with Bruce. We drove around in his convertible looking for Geiger counters to measure the radioactivity under his home. In his basement studio, I listened to his stories about the 1960s and 1970s art-scene and growing up in Kansas, while he re-spliced his films for preservation—work I was supposed to be doing.
In 1989, Flaherty programmer Pearl Bowser invited me to screen my then-recent San Francisco State University graduate thesis film, Sermons and Sacred Pictures: The Life and Work of Reverend L.O. Taylor [1989 (https://vimeo.com/158998653)]. I was grateful—and surprised by her invitation to be part of a Flaherty seminar comprised almost entirely of African-American and African filmmakers.
As a high school student in Memphis, Tennessee, I had seen Reverend Taylor’s 16mm film archive of Black urban life. Eight years later, I returned to my hometown to reconnect with this complicated, racially traumatized city in a new way, through his images and by talking to the people who knew him.
Making Sermons and Sacred Pictures was an intense, intimate, revealing experience. I spent two months walking around neighborhoods I barely knew. I asked questions about Taylor and myself. This was my first brush with making a film about a person’s life experience outside my own.
Reverend Taylor was a filmmaker I admired like none other. He shot from the inside out, a Black minister filming his own community with his own Bolex with the intention of screening these films for the people who were in them.
I tried to deal with my own presence as filmmaker. I resisted filming my face. I always made it clear that I was the one listening and filming, hiding and exposed, in ways that only cinema makes possible. I spent a lot of time talking about this issue with my professors Trinh T Minh-ha (who was also a Flaherty guest artist that year) and Peggy Ahwesh.
I’d had very little experience discussing my film with an audience. Film scholar Teshome Gabriel, the facilitator for that day at Flaherty, was extraordinarily supportive of the film and me. Filmmakers Marlon Riggs and Zeinabu Irene Davis, my Brown University college friend, were both there. Many of us at that seminar remained deeply connected. During the 1991 Gulf War, about twenty of us reconvened on a charter flight to Burkina Faso, where we attended the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO).
But screening Sermons at that Flaherty also brought a new awareness and self-consciousness. Some seminarians reacted to my depiction of a Black man’s life from my perspective as a White woman with a mixture of skepticism and enthusiasm. (Just before I wrote this piece, I was in touch with filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira, who attended that 1989 seminar and has written poignantly about her own feelings about these issues in her Flaherty Story.)
In 2000 I returned to the Flaherty. Programmer Kathy Geritz had asked me to facilitate several post-screening discussions of Trang Tran’s Blindness Series [1992-2000]: five videos exploring blindness as a metaphor.
For weeks, I threw myself into Tran’s work, watching each video many times. I took scrupulous notes. Her films are difficult in the best way: aggressive, casual, complex, discursive, irrepressible, nuanced, refined… The seminar divided between those transfixed by her cerebral magic and those insulted by her opaque point of view, aggressive editing, and her comfort with what some might consider vulgar.
In 2011, I attended Dan Streible’s “Sonic Truth” seminar as a participant. I was struggling with the editing of my hybrid documentary Your Day Is My Night [2013], convinced that by attending the seminar, I’d discover editing strategies to help me climb out of what I considered the disaster of my film. I saw important work by legendary filmmakers Les Blank and George Stoney, both of whom died not long after. Yet no work at that seminar sparked me.
Two years later I returned for Pablo de Ocampo’s “History Is What’s Happening” seminar. It featured astonishing films by the audacious Canadian maker Jean-Paul Kelly and by the cerebral British collective, The Otolith Group. That year, I finally realized how to take notes at the Flaherty. After every screening, I now write about the films on the right side of my journal, then I write new ideas about my own projects on the left.
In 2018, I returned again. Programmers Kevin Jerome Everson, a filmmaker, and Greg de Cuir, a curator, reclaimed the commitment to presenting the work of African and African-American filmmakers that I had witnessed in 1989. They presented an awe-inspiring collection of films by experimental makers Karimah Ashadu (Nigeria), Ephraim Asili, Kitso Lynn Lelliott (South Africa), Christopher Harris, and Cauleen Smith. Revelations filled both sides of my journal.”
Authors Scott MacDonald is Professor of Art History and Director of Cinema and Media Studies at Hamilton College. He is author (with Patricia R. Zimmermann) of The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema; The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama; Binghamton Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department, 1967–1977; and Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema. Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Media Arts, Sciences and Studies at Ithaca College and Director (with Thomas Shevory) of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is author (with Scott MacDonald) of The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema; Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics; (with Helen De Michiel) Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice; and Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of Independent Public Media.
Marking it’s debut edition, Prismatic Ground is a film festival of endless potential. Space for experimental cinema, particularly short form, is hard to come by, and thankfully it appears as though a new, heavily curated festival is set to give these incredible artists a new ground to show their work. But again, it’s a first edition. What could they possibly collect on their first try? Well, if these seven(ish) films are any hint, we may be at the ground floor of one of the country’s most interesting experimental film festivals.
6. The Films of Lynne Sachs
Another sidebar, although not one found in the main program, director Lynne Sachs is being honored as the inaugural winner of the “Ground Glass Award,” the festival’s award given to a person who has contributed to the world of experimental media. Being honored by both the award and a pair of programs, eight of the director’s short and medium-length works are being highlighted here, led by one of her more well known works (at least recently), A Month of Single Frames (For Barbara Hammer). Made in 2019 but just now making its way out of the festival circuit, the short is actually also available on MUBI at the moment, and sees the director collaborating with late director Barbara Hammer by finishing her final project in what ultimately results in a profoundly moving and aesthetically captivating character study of sorts. Other highlights include Sermons and Sacred Pictures, Sachs’ 1989 documentary about Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister with a passion for filmmaking, and also maybe the best film of the bunch The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts. This 30 minute experimental documentary from 1991 looks at the depiction of the female body throughout history, and is as provocative today as it ever has been. Sachs is also featured in the main slate with her 4 minute masterpiece Drawn and Quartered, another film about perception, looking and gender.
7. 4 Films By Bill Morrison
Starting off this preview of the debut Prismatic Ground festival, we turn to a sort of sidebar-within-a-sidebar. Structured largely around four “waves,” Prismatic Ground is highlighting films with similar themes and ideas, and for the first entry we turn to, of course, the first wave. Within the first wave known as “desire is already a memory,” Prismatic Ground is highlighting four brand new shorts from beloved director Bill Morrison. Including the likes of 2020’s Curly Takes a Bath By The Sea and 2021’s trio of Sunken Films, Wild Girl and The Ring, these collectively only run around 30 minutes, but are as entrancing a quartet of films as you’ll see all year. Chief among them is Curly Takes a Bath, which is a short the director produced during lockdown that is strangely one of the more moving explorations of the striving for freedom that lockdown has brought us. Sunken Films feels squarely in his wheelhouse as its story of lost films discovered is a topic found throughout his career, as is the idea of loss and decay, which is the topic of both Wild Girl and The Ring, the former being maybe the director’s most formally interesting work collected here.
5. Home In The Woods
The feature film highlighted in the fourth wave (the same wave as the above mentioned Sachs film), Home in the Woods is about as singular a vision as you’ll ever encounter. At once maximalist in its experimental aesthetic and yet born out of the most minimal of intents, Home is director Brandon Wilson’s exploration of a forest near the filmmaker’s own home in Oregon. However, this isn’t a rudimentary point and shoot style, almost zen-like document of metaphysical freedom. No, instead Wilson crafts a relatively narrative-free deconstruction of the cyclical nature of the world around us and man’s own relationship to the space we inhabit. Pairing incredible sound design with filmmaking choices ranging from dynamic color processing to the use of microscopic imagery, Home has an almost science-fiction like feel, despite being a decidedly tactile and organic work. Not so much born of the lockdown era as the perfect type of conversation piece with it, Wilson’s film is in many ways one of the great pandemic documents. A film about the beauty of nature that plays as both zen installation piece and hypnotic slow cinema deconstruction.
4. Too Long Here
Back to the wide array of shorts collected here, for one of the more anger-inducing viewing experiences of the festival. More or less a seven-minute short film looking at the day that former First Lady Pat Nixon inaugurated a stretch of land along the US-Mexico border as “Friendship Park,” Too Long Here is director Emily Packer’s recontextualizing this event opposite the increasing racism and xenophobia that has ultimately culminated with not just former president Donald Trump, but his “liberal” replacement Joe Biden potentially continuing the building of the disastrous border wall. A soul-crushing exploration of America’s failed promise and increasing descent into nationalism is the real focus here, with Packer using lushly restored footage from the inauguration set against what the viewer is keenly aware of as the future for this relationship. In just seven minutes Packer stacks her film with fascinating moments from that day in history, and culminates with an absolute emotional gut punch of a final moment. A fascinating, deeply important work.
3. The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant
From one singular picture to another. The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant is from director Jim Finn, and tells the story of General Grant, as he attempts to liberate the southern states during the 1860s. However, this isn’t your father’s historical documentary. Instead Finn takes things like board games and collectible trading cards to lay out the respective battles Grant found himself in, pairing these opposite modern day landscapes of former battlefields, all shot in gorgeous 16mm. An engrossing, travelogue-like riff on a legendary historical figure, Field Guide is a strange melting together of the revered (former battleground location footage) and juvenile (board games). This is also a brilliant piece of research, moving viewers from the border between Texas and Louisiana up to the coast of New England, pairing seemingly misplaced thing like a 1970’s inspired soundtrack with deeply textured and dense historical background, making this an endlessly surprising feature.
2. The Films of Anita Thacher
The final director-focused collection on this list, Anita Thacher’s work is set to open the festival, with seven of her rarely seen shorts getting highlighted as the opening night centerpiece. This collection is led by the incomparable Loose Corner from 1986, which is being shown as a restoration-in-progress screening, as the Academy Film Archive is currently attempting to bring this masterpiece back to life. Cinephiles may find one of her later films, Cut to be compelling, particularly it’s fascinating use of image, sound and editing, and those, and I myself am transfixed by Loose Corner, maybe the most playfully kinetic of the films collected here. It’s a gloriously anarchic experiment in filmmaking and space, and features some of the most formally inventive sleights of hand you’ll ever find. These are exactly the type of one of a kind visual experiments that make Prismatic Ground a fantastic new player on the festival circuit, and will hopefully inspire more people to give these filmmakers proper respect.
1. Second Star To The Right And Straight On ‘Til Morning
Rounding out this list is arguably the most buzzed about film of the festival, and for just cause. Originally intended to be included on potential home video releases for the underrated Ben Zeitlin film Wendy, Second Star is the latest film from directors Bill and Turner Ross, and is not only likely never to make any release of the film they documented, but may very well never see the light of day commercially following this festival run. Billed as “too experimental” by the studio, this documentary is less about the making of the film itself and more about the spirit of the children that helped make it happen, embracing a sense of freedom and almost whimsy that is truly unlike any making of picture you’ve ever seen. Featuring little to know actual interviews, the film is more a collection of moments, of lives, all the while feeling decidedly of the Ross Brothers. Inherently a film about community, Second Star feels like a distant relative to a film like Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, a film about performance and family, catching small moments like a child blessing someone’s sneeze in the middle of a conversation, all the while making these happenstances feel immensely moving. There simply aren’t filmmakers quite like these two, filmmakers with endless empathy and compassion.
A PANEL DISCUSSION BETWEEN LYNNE SACHS (DIRECTOR), REBECCA J SHAPASS (EDITOR), STEPHEN VITIELLO (MUSIC AND SOUNDSCAPE), KEVIN T ALLEN (SOUND COLLAGE AND MIX), AND RACHEL ROSHEGER (ANIMATION AND CREDITS) WILL TAKE PLACE ON SATURDAY, APRIL 3 AT 4PM EST. MODERATED BY EMILY APTER AND INNEY PRAKASH.
“Our conversation will look at the way that films can be made with collaborators who bring their own vision and insight to a project. Dialogue with each of these people was critical to the making of my film, providing challenges to my own assumptions about working with and beyond reality. These four people pushed me to think in new ways about my own process and intention in the editing, sound and graphic design that were so much a part of the making of Film About a Father Who.” — Lynne Sachs
Barbara Hammer has always been challenging. In memory of her work and activities, she provided materials for her short film, which will be released for the first time in Japan, and her own work in her later years, and produced a short film in collaboration with Deborah Stratman, Mark Street, and Lynn Sach. A special project to screen 3 works.
Feminist Queer movie month: Barbara Hammer
Feminist Ando Queer Film Month 2021: Remembering Barbara Hammer ■ Screening Date: 2021 March 31 (Wednesday) 19:20 ★ after the screening, held an online Q & A with phosphorus Sachs Director ■ screenings Works (4 works in total, 58 minutes in total)
“Bent Time” Bent Time America / 1984 / Digital / 22 minutes Director / Filming / Editing: Barbara Hammer / Music: Pauline Oliveros
▶ ︎ Rays bend at the edge of the universe, A work inspired by the remarks of scientists who advocated that time also bends. The scenery of Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico and the cityscape of New Mexico, taken with a 9mm wide-angle lens, along with the meditative original score of electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, feels like time is distorted. Bring.
“Vever (for Barbara)” Vever (for Barbara) USA / 2019 / English / Color / Digital / 12 minutes Director / Editing / Sound: Deborah Stratman / Shooting / Voice: Barbara Hammer / Text / Local recording: Maya Deren
Shape: Teiji Ito / Music: Teiji Ito, Teiji Ito, George Hardau / Provided by: Pythagoras Film
▶ ︎ A work created from each unfinished project by Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. A video of Hummer traveling on a motorcycle in Guatemala in 1975 is linked to a story about the Haiti ritual and his own experience of failure that Delen met in the 1950s. Three filmmakers of different generations explore the possibility of replacing the power structure of which they are part.
“Many Ideas Impossible To Do All America / 2019 / Color / Digital / 11 Minutes Director / Edit :: Mark Street
▶ ︎ Jane Wardening (Brackage) and Barbara Hammer Hammer, who was looking to create a work from Hammer’s 1973-85 correspondence record, brought all the materials and footage of “Jane Brakhage” (1974) to filmmaker Mark Street in 2018. The work that was taken over and produced. Draws a complex friendship that connects Wodening and Hummer’s long distance.
“One Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer)” A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) USA / 2019 / English / Color / Digital / 14 minutes Director: Lynne Sachs, Barbara Hammer / Photo: Barbara Hammer / Editing Text (Onscreen): Lynne Sachs
▶ ︎ In 1998, Barbara Hammer kept a diary by recording various sounds and landscapes around him while staying in a seaside hut in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA, where neither electricity nor water was available. This work was produced as a process of confronting his own death by entrusting all the records created at that time to the filmmaker Lynne Sachs. Along with the eyes of observing the quietly buzzing colors and sounds of nature, thoughts about loneliness and aging emerge.
Following my review of her latest, “Film About a Father Who” (2020) which I saw as part of her exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, I sat down with Lynne to dive deeper into this poignant and revealing film.
Going through all this footage, was it ever just too painful? Did you ever think “I need to walk away from this”?
In a sense, every film I made since ’91 is a walk away from this film. For example, I made a film with my sister in 1994 called “Which Way is East?” She was living in Vietnam as a journalist. In the early ‘90’s she was one of the first journalists to be there and I went there with her to kind of understand the Vietnam War from the perspective of Vietnamese people. It’s very much from that of two sisters, two women, what we notice. It’s definitely not from a former soldier who is going back to Vietnam would notice. That film was made and finished in ’94 and it was a run to my sister but away from the Dad film. I actually started that film as a triptych, “Film About a Father Who,” that was about the ways that you can know about another person. I made this film that was about my Dad, and then I made a film about a woman who was a filmmaker and a mother who lived in Israel and how her life got wrapped up in the violence of the Middle East. She was a total stranger but ..I felt a connection to her. So, I made that film called “States of Unbelonging.” And then I made a film about a relative of mine. I never met him but during WWII he lived in Europe, in Rome specifically. He was a doctor and he reconstructed the bodies of dead American soldiers. I called it “cosmetic surgery” and it was all about his letters. He was kind of connected to me but also a stranger.
So, there were these three degrees of how you can know another person and you would think the one about my father would be the easiest but it was hardest because it was painful, there was shame. There was an inability to find distance, and also even aesthetically I would look at film footage that I had shot all through the ‘90’s and the Aughts, I would look at the mediums and not like it, it didn’t look as good! I would be very judgmental of it. Until I had this flip, which you articulated very well, this is the skin and the texture of that era, so why not celebrate it? I made “States of Unbelonging” in 2005 and the film about my cousin was called “The Last Happy Day” in 2009 so I kept doing other things because it felt more possible and less intimidating.
I noticed that in your ending credits, you suggested the diagramming of a sentence? Maybe I read too much into that.
Oh, yes! Oh, yes-you got it! I did a lot of diagramming in junior high school…I thought that they had stopped teaching diagramming because my daughters never learned it which I thought was a shame. But my editor assistant, Rebecca has a very good friend of hers who does animation, went to an all-girl Catholic school and at least in 2010 let’s say, they were teaching diagramming. When I said to the two of them I want my credits to be this ambiguous play between a family tree and diagramming, because both of those are sort of structuring devices we can use to introduce people to relationships.. [the animator] got it…I don’t think she had ever done credits before but she had done animation. In my mind I was so insistent that it had to be something like that and she just got it and she went way beyond what I ever expected…The thing is I could have made my life a lot easier in this film if I had a family tree early. I could have eliminated the mystery, my mystery, my confusion. If I gave you a family tree than you would get clarity like that! I didn’t want that and I didn’t really care at all if you would finish this film and you would know…you would probably know that I’m the oldest. You didn’t have to know the order of everything else because things were more associative and I didn’t want it to be so rigid that way. I wanted it to be more amorphous and for you to keep asking questions, even about your own family.
…This brings up something I’ve never talked to anyone about in relation to “Film About a Father Who” which is, this is a film about a parent. I’m a mother. Everybody writes about this film being about a daughter but it’s really a film about a parent. Actually, maybe more because I didn’t understand all the responsibilities of being a parent, I didn’t understand the expectations, the complexities of how you live your life in relation to these other people. And the idea that you leave an imprint. I realize in talking to you, that I couldn’t finish it until I had become a parent because that allowed me to move into this other zone, not exclusively being a daughter. I could handle a lot more once I had my children and once I knew how much guilt is involved in being a parent; like, did I make the wrong decision? Maybe my Dad didn’t have that superego that said, “Don’t do that, that’s going to make your child feel bad!”
We’re almost out of time, so what’s next?
Oh, that’s a fun question! Well, I have been spending a lot of time on the distribution of the film. It’s distributed through Cinema Guild. I’m a filmmaker more than a director so because of that I’m used to traveling…I like talking to the audiences. Sometimes I do workshops, I try to put together shows in little storefronts… but we’re not doing that now. Working with my distributor has been a lot of work and pleasure. What a treat that’s been! I’ve also probably made around four or five short films since the pandemic. They’re all plays between sound and image. For example, I made a film which was a commission for a film festival in Spain called Punto de Viste which is a super interesting film festival in Pamplona. They asked ten filmmakers around the world to make a film and they gave us each 400 Euros, which is enough to make a digital film. The film was supposed to be a letter to a filmmaker who had been important to us who was no longer alive. I chose Jean Vigo, he made “Zero for Conduct” (1933) and “L’Atalante” (1934) and he was a filmmaker in the 1930’s. He only made three films but he is very beloved to people in the experimental and documentary film world. His film “Zero for Conduct” is 45 minutes and it’s about boys in a boarding school, who take over the boarding school. It’s very anti-authoritarian. They’re very adorable, and feisty and crazy and it’s all about childhood anarchy in the 1930’s. It’s a great film. On January 6th, when the rioters broke into the Capitol and the violence ensued, I started to think about when playing becomes dangerous. I made this short film as a letter to John Vigo but it uses footage from the January 6th breach. I also cut it into a film that Peter Brook made, “Lord of the Flies” (1963). In “Lord of the Flies” you see these boys that have landed on this island and they become very violent. They endanger one another and themselves so that space between beautiful anarchy and violence was interesting, so I made that film. I don’t think short films are calling cards to the big ones. I like making films of all lengths… so it has been kind of exhilarating. I [also] have a big project that has something to do with Ida B. Wells. It’s a collaboration with a friend of mine who teaches African American studies. Ida B. Wells was a journalist who researched lynching. She comes from Memphis which is where I come from so there are stories I want to explore related to her life.
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 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.
“These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family.- Kat Sachs, Cine-File Read Kat Sachs’ full review of “Film About a Father Who” on cine-file
“Film About a Father Who” will be available in DCTV’s virtual cinema through April 22, 2021. Get your tickets HERE!
“Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love.” — Kat Sachs, Cine-File
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.
With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
This online rental in DCTV’s Virtual Cinema includes a Q&A with film critic Ela Bittencourt, as well as an exclusive Q&A with Director Lynne Sachs and Cine-File’s Kat Sachs, where Lynne Sachs looks fondly back to her first film class at DCTV. We’re so honored to be able to continue to support and share her work. This film is not to be missed! Watch >
A conversation between Sachs and Edo Choi (Assistant Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image) accompanying the Roxie’s Bay Area premiere of “Film About a Father Who.” The premiere was programmed alongside two shorts programs curated by filmmaker Craig Baldwin.
