Category Archives: SECTIONS

Image Forum Presents “Feminist Queer Movie Month: Barbara Hammer”

Feminist Queer Movie Month: Barbara Hammer
Curated by Subversive Records
Image Forum 
2021 March 31 
http://www.imageforum.co.jp/theatre/movies/4259/

Rough English Translation:

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.

In Their Own League – Interview with Lynne Sachs

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR LYNNE SACHS
In Their Own League 
March 30, 2021
By Joan Amenn 
https://intheirownleague.com/2021/03/30/exclusive-interview-with-director-lynne-sachs/

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.

Barbara Hammer Commemorated with Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award

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.

4 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT BARBARA HAMMER

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.

DCTV presents “Film About a Father Who” and a conversation between Kat Sachs & Lynne Sachs

“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!

DCTV Presents
Film About a Father Who

http://news.dctvny.org/q/qNMm2XG6IICrU7XrJvrXOH-ShggvU1FW-_KmRmP-9Vd8NfhQo66wtOeF6

Dir. Lynne Sachs / 2021

“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 >

https://cinemaguild.vhx.tv/checkout/film-about-a-father-who-dctv/purchase

Filmwax TV Reunites “Tip of My Tongue” Cast in for Sachs’ MoMI Retrospective

The cast of TIP OF MY TONGUE discusses how their lives have changed since the completion of the film in 2017. Created in conjunction with Lynne Sachs Retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image Feb. 2021. With Adam Schartoff (host), Accra Shepp, Eric Schurink, Lynne Sachs, Sue Simon, Andrea Kanapell, Shoei Dalai, Jim Supanick, and George Sanchez.

For more from Filmwax TV visit their YouTube channel!

Film Rezensionen Reviews “A Month of Single Frames”

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.

The living legacy of Barbara Hammer

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.

Lynne Sachs Awarded “Ground Glass Award” at Prismatic Ground

Prismatic Ground 
March 2021
Screen Slate 
https://www.screenslate.com/articles/prismatic-ground

Hosted April 8-18 
Here: https://www.prismaticground.com/

Prismatic Ground is a new film festival centered on experimental documentary. The inaugural edition of the festival, founded by Inney Prakash, will be hosted virtually in partnership with Maysles Documentary Center and Screen Slate. Catch the ‘Opening Night,’ ‘Centerpiece,’ and ‘Closing Night’ events live via Screen Slate’s Twitch channel. The rest of the films, split into four loosely themed sections or ‘waves’, will be available for the festival’s duration at prismaticground.com and through maysles.org. On April 10, at 4PM ET, Prismatic Ground will present the inaugural Ground Glass Award for outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media to Lynne Sachs. Other live engagements TBA.

Logo: Kelsey Kaptur

Opening Night: Thursday, April 8th at 8PM ET on twitch.tv/screenslate

The Films of Anita Thacher
Co-presented by Microscope Gallery. Film critic Amy Taubin in conversation.

Centerpiece: Thursday, April 15th at 8PM ET on twitch.tv/screenslate

Newsreels of the Distant Now, a special presentation by Creative Agitation (Erin and Travis Wilkerson)
Filmmakers in conversation.

Closing Night: Sunday, April 18th at 8PM ET on twitch.tv/screenslate

Second Star to the Right and Straight on ‘Til Morning (dir. Bill and Turner Ross) + Dadli (dir. Shabier Kirchner, 2018, 14 min.)
Filmmakers in conversation.

Streaming through the festival’s duration at prismaticground.com and through maysles.org:

Ground Glass Award

The following programs of Lynne Sachs’s films were originally curated by filmmaker Craig Baldwin as “Sidebars” to accompany a run of Film About a Father Who at The Roxie cinema in San Francisco. They appear here courtesy of Baldwin and Canyon Cinema. Sachs also recently received a career retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, curated by Edo Choi.

Prismatic Ground honors filmmaker Lynne Sachs with the inaugural Ground Glass Award for outstanding contribution to the field of experimental media. Two film programs curated by Craig Baldwin available through the fest + a conversation with canyon cinema executive director Brett Kashmere on Saturday, April 10th at 4pm Eastern Daylight Time. [Watch the Recording]

PROGRAM 1

INQUIRIES INTO SELF AND OTHER

“‘89 Sermons offers an early glimmer of her sensitivity to both marginalized communities and their archives, as she gracefully threads ultra-rare ‘30s & ’40s footage from Rev. LO Taylor into a tapestry of visibility and respect for Memphis’ Black community. Her facility for celluloid extrapolation is demonstrated in even more creative ways in House of Science, a personal essay on female identity, told through found footage, poetic text, and playful experimental technique. Which Way is East raises its eyes to engagements in international waters, and to insightful exchanges with her expat sister Dana, towards new understandings of and in the oh-so-historically charged Republic of Vietnam.  Opening is Lynne’s first ever 16mm, Still Life.” – Craig Baldwin

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (4 min., 1986)
Sermons and Sacred Pictures (29 min., 1989)
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (30 min., 1991)
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (made with Dana Sachs) (33 min., 1994)

PROGRAM 2

PROFILES IN COURAGE

“Characteristically, Sachs speaks in first person to cultural difference and dissent, here particularly valorizing acts of resistance and struggles for justice. Her collaboration with the recently deceased lesbian maker Barbara Hammer keynotes this ‘Solidarity’ set, with Lynne literally framing/finishing her mentor’s last project. Younger allies are also acknowledged in Sachs’ inspiring 2017 celebration of women’s political power on contested Washington, DC turf. The 2001 Investigation is a tribute to the courage and conscience of the epochal Berrigan-led burning of Baltimore draft records, made while Sachs was teaching in that town. And the local debut of The Washing Society, produced with playwright Lizzie Olesker, stakes their support of NYC’s low-paid laundry workers—mostly women of color—in even another radiant illumination of the little-seen truths of contemporary race/class inequity.” – Craig Baldwin

A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (14 min., 2019)
Investigation of a Flame (45 min., 2001)
And Then We Marched (4 min., 2017)
The Washing Society (co-directed with Lizzie Olesker) (44 min., 2018)

Drawn & Quartered will also be streaming in the program- wave 4: through the flowering fields of the sea

Home in the Woods (dir. Brandon Wilson, 2020, 96 min.)
Bodes In Dissent (dir. Ufuoma Essi, 2021, 6 min.)
Make Sure the Sea Is Still There (dir. Gloria Chung, 2021, 8 min.)
The Aquarium (dir. Paweł Wojtasik, 2006, 22 min.)
hold — fuel — when — burning (dir. dd. chu, 2020, 11 min.)
Depths (dir. Ryan Marino, 2020, 5 min.)
Look Then Below (dir. Ben Rivers, 2019, 22 min.)
Drawn & Quartered (dir. Lynne Sachs, 1986, 4 min.)
End of the Season (dir. Jason Evans, 2020, 13 min.)
Learning About Flowers and Their Seeds (dir. Emily Apter and Annie Horner, 2021, 4 min.)
A Slight Wrinkle in the Strata (dir. Ryan Clancy, 2021, 30 min.)
Back Yard (dir. Arlin Golden, 2020, 7 min.)
In Our Nature (dir. Sara Leavitt, 2019, 3 min.)
By Way of Canarsie (dir. Lesley Steele and Emily Packer, 2019, 14 min.)

About Prismatic Ground
Prismatic Ground is a New York festival centered on experimental documentary. Hosted by Maysles Documentary Center and online NYC film resource Screen Slate, the festival will be primarily virtual for its first year barring a timely end to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

We seek work that pushes the formal boundaries of non-fiction in the spirit and tradition of experimental filmmaking. This “spirit” is somewhat amorphous, undefinable, and open to interpretation, but refers to work that engages with its own materiality, and that privileges a heightened artistic experience over clear meaning.

For a better sense of what we’re looking for, here are some filmmakers that inspire us: Chris Marker, Lynne Sachs, Kevin Jerome Everson, The Otolith Group, Black Audio Film Collective, Pat O’Neill, Cecilia Condit, Edward Owens, Chick Strand, Barbara Hammer, Khalik Allah, Michael Snow, Janie Geiser, Isaac Julien, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Sky Hopinka, Fern Silva, Akosua Adoma Owusu…