This week, MUBI is spotlighting two short films—”A Month Of Single Frames” and “Vever (For Barbara)”— that encapsulate the late, great avant-garde filmmaker.
Few filmmakers are as foundational to American cinema yet as underappreciated as Barbara Hammer. At face value, this may be a result of her penchant to feature healthy amounts of frontal nudity, but her films’ confrontational marriage of the personal and political is probably more to blame. Hammer’s early work could be seen as a sort of feminist furthering of the principles of Direct Cinema, making the camera an extension of herself to document lived experience.
More formally inventive and abstract work was the point; the heightened nature of perception is too complicated to accurately capture by just pointing and shooting. Sensations, particularly those experienced by queer women, demanded an avant-garde style to accompany the feminist theory of the films. While subjects and themes of Hammer’s output changed over time (as she began cancer treatments in 2006), this political ethos always remained. Her work exists in a lineage of queer experimental artists who recognized that radical ideas demand radical forms, and that the personal and political are always entwined.
Given her vast filmography, MUBI’s recent selection of Hammer’s films— including 2019’s A Month Of Single Frames (co-directed with Lynne Sachs) and Deborah Stratman’s Hammer tribute, Vever(also from 2019)— feels like a sort of “Advanced Hammer Studies” curriculum, which focus on pieces that were completed collaboratively near the time of her death. In both shorts, Hammer and her process are subjects just as much as the landscapes and cultures she captures.
A Month of Single Frames finds Hammer towards the end of her life in conversation with Lynne Sachs. A fellow experimentalist concerned with the particulars of language and communication, Sachs is a fine complement to Hammer’s more elemental style. Working with original footage taken in 1998, Sachs edited the film with an audio track by Hammer that details the original failed project where she went to the desert and attempted to capture light patterns on the arid landscape. Single Frames shows its seams, sometimes focusing on unadorned landscape shots, and at others exhibiting unnatural changes in coloration and inorganic objects Hammer places in front of the camera.
“Why is it I can’t see nature, whole and pure, without artifice?” she wonders to herself, trying to capture the beauty of a sunrise. Considering how Hammer’s past films directly (and seemingly effortlessly) translated experience, this comes as something of a shock. She lets the viewer in on the constant struggle of attempting to remove the author, when anything intentionally captured on film is automatically removed from reality. Sachs is less focused on this dissonance in her own work and, thus, is a helpful collaborator to let Hammer out of her own head. This second layer of removal allows the work to breathe and stand as a touching portrait of someone who loved but was sometimes defeated by her own work.
MUBI’s intended companion, Deborah Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara), further fragments Hammer’s own work by putting her ethnographic footage and recorded interviews in conversation with texts and field recordings by trailblazer Maya Deren. Shooting in Guatemala in 1975, Hammer zeroes in on the labor performed by women in a local marketplace, showcasing the visually dazzling interplay of reds and oranges in the mélange of cloth. According to Hammer, her original footage was taken in a desperate time in her life when filming was a search for meaning (and more practically, for money). She characterizes this project as a failure, hence supplicating herself and her work to the editing of another filmmaker to make some sense of it decades later.
Deren’s writing that intermittently flashes on the screen is also preoccupied with artistic failure, as it documents a trip she made to Haiti in the 1950’s where she wrestled with accepting failure as a necessary part of the artistic process. Both women’s trips, especially when paired together, reek of a typical sort of white exoticization, where some foreign locale is meant to be the catalyst for a deep personal change. While the work leans problematic because of this context, its focus on failure also shows the limits of that kind of self-actualization. On their respective trips, both women realize that foreign ethnography would not save them, and the film (whether intentionally or not) is an implicit critique of this colonialist impulse.
In her voiceover to A Month Of Single Frames, Hammer at one point says she is “overwhelmed by simplicity;” although, one feels she is not giving herself enough credit. Her films employ dense historical and theoretical references, but her style has often been a focused cinematic translation of the experience of sight and touch. Rather, she is the one who has made simplicity overwhelming and challenged implicit notions about what is and isn’t simple. Listening to her detailing of failures in this regard is a refreshing insight to her process, adding another layer of humanity to an already uncommonly humane body of avant-garde work.
The pairing of A Month Of Single Frames and Vever also put Hammer’s work in a useful historical context, showing how her work grew from Deren’s and became integral to the contemporary feminist avant-garde represented by Sachs and Stratman. Hammer’s work (more of which is hosted on the Capricious Gallery’s Vimeo page) is a necessary piece of the past, present, and future of radical film.
Maxwell Courtright Maxwell Courtright works as a case manager for adults with disabilities in Madison. He formerly worked with WUD Film and programmed the 2015-2016 season of the Starlight Experimental Film series.
SYNOPSIS In 1998 lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer took part in a one-month residency at a Cape Cod dune shack without running water or electricity, where she shot film, recorded sound and kept a journal. In 2018 she gave all of this material to Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with it.
OUR TAKE Turning to an unfinished film project by the pioneering queer experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, Lynne Sachs animates the material into a loving dialogue with the director. A shimmering, kaleidoscopic diary film that gently reflects on aging, solitude and the sheer beauty of the world around us.
SHOWING AS PART OF WAYS OF SEEING WITH BARBARA HAMMER Best known for her frank portrayals of lesbian sexuality, the pioneering queer experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer sadly passed away in 2019, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy. A small part of this is the unfinished films that became a key component in Hammer’s residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts. As her health worsened, Hammer invited several filmmakers, including Lynne Sachs and Deborah Stratman, to work with her on fashioning new works out of the incomplete material. This project catalyzed dynamic intergenerational collaborations between Hammer’s material and the new filmmakers: Both Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara) and Sachs’s A Month of Single Frames invite us to explore new ways of seeing with the unforgettable, and much missed Barbara Hammer.
The arthouse streaming provider Mubi has added the cinematic diary poem “A Month of Single Frames” to its range. In the 14-minute work, the American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs processes recordings made by her fellow artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). The pioneer of lesbian avant-garde cinema lived in a hut on Cape Cod in Massachusetts for a month in 1998 and captured her impressions of the secluded life with 8 and 16mm cameras, sound recordings and notes. In view of a progressive cancer disease, she handed the unused material over to Lynne Sachs in 2018, who added her own images and texts.
In her blog “ From the first person,” Siegfried Kracauer scholarship holder Esther Buss paid tribute to the unusual project as a joint effort in January 2021, in which the collaboration does not serve to disguise, but rather to progress. The collaboration reflects a shared experience in a singular way that represents women’s friendship as well as a lively form of estate work: “One has seldom seen a tale of loneliness and nature more turned towards the world.”
In the jointly written diary-poem “A Month of Single Frames”, the American experimental filmmaker processes recordings by her artist colleague Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019. The collaboration does not serve the purpose of concealment, as Esther Buss elaborates in her Kracauer blog, but of progression: the “we” is like opening a door.
Lynne Sachs’ A Month of Single Frames (2020) is a collaborative diary-poem made with and for Barbara Hammer. That’s what it says at the end of the film. Hammer, a pioneer of avant-garde lesbian cinema who passed away in 2019, has always been generous in her work. In her short, experimental films, but also in the memoirs published in 2010 (“ Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life ”), she shared her own (sensual and sexual) experiences and placed them in a larger context of collective queer identity.
Hammer was also generous with his own authorship. As the artist began to organize her estate as her cancer progressed, she gave the younger Lynne Sachs 8mm and 16mm images, sound recordings, and notes that were made twenty years earlier during a month-long residency on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and have resided ever since had stayed. Sachs was invited to make a film from the footage. “ A Month of Single Frames ”, almost 14 minutes long, is the result of this invitation, which in turn is an expression of a female friendship as well as a living concept of estate work.
A form of community building
A form of community building is also inherent in Lynne Sachs’ films. They often emerge from close collaborations, for example with close or distant family members, with migrant communities and artistic companions. In Film About A Father Who (2020), her most recent work, she approaches the elusive figure of her father, Ira Sachs – father of nine children by many different women – in the form of a fractured essay shared with numerous voices and perspectives . In “ Your Day is My Night’ (2013) ‘sharing’, on the other hand, is an economic necessity. The subject and setting of the film is a so-called “shift-bed” apartment in Chinatown – an apartment in which Chinese immigrants share a bed in shifts, in line with their precarious day and night jobs. What connects Sachs most closely with Hammer, however, is their understanding of film as a physical, tactile experience. “A Month of Single Frames” also wants to be experienced rather than viewed.
Wants to be viewed less, experienced more: “A Month of Single Frames” (Lynne Sachs)
Retreating to a secluded hut without electricity and running water is a motif charged with cultural history, especially in Massachusetts, after all, the legendary “Walden Pond” is barely more than 200 kilometers away. (Thoreau also wrote a book about Cape Cod, which is less well known). However, “A Month of Single Frames” is anything but introspection and nature-pious contemplation; one has seldom seen a tale of loneliness and nature that is more open to the world. On the one hand, this is due to Hammer’s extremely haptic images and her very own understanding of “visual pleasure”. On the other hand, the posthumous editing by Sachs, which opens up the space for a shared experience.
Overwhelmed by simplicity
Lynne Sachs assembled tape recordings that were made shortly before her friend’s death in April 2019 in her studio – she had Hammer read from her “Duneshack” journal, you can also hear fragments of their conversation – with film images: recordings of insects, the sparse vegetation in the dunes, of light reflections, shadow plays and weather changes, of banal everyday things that transform into lyrical objects in the camera’s view. “I am overwhelmed by simplicity,” Hammer is once heard to say emphatically to the image of a shred of plastic film blowing in the wind. Another time, she gazes in fascination at a bow tie in which she recognizes a miniature army helicopter patrolling the coast. Despite all the amazement at the many things that are waiting to be discovered with the senses: Her delight in cinematic experimentation overwhelms any attempt at naturalistic viewing. “Why is it I can’t see nature whole and pure without artifice?” Hammer once wondered.
She played extensively with the possibilities of camera technology, for example by slowing down the throughput of the film material until single frames were recorded. Elsewhere, colored foils cast colorful lights in the sand or immerse the landscape in shimmering, luminous magenta.
“I’m here with you in this movie”
The most striking sign of the “second” authorship is Sachs’ own text. In it, the friend who is both present and absent is addressed. He lies “silently” over the image, is an authorial voice in a reflective soliloquy as well as a voice in an intimate dialogue, which finally dissolves in the collective of all those who are watching the film “together” at that moment. “You are alone” – “I am here with you in this film” – “There are others here with us” – “We are all together”.
We Are All Together: “A Month of Single Frames” (Lynne Sachs)
With the circulation and multiplication of personal pronouns, tooChantal Akerman in her films, such as “I, you, he, she ” (1974). With Sachs, however, behind the sequence of pronouns is not the veiling of the self, but progression. The “we” in the film is like opening a door. One is called, invited in, feels meant. One is everywhere now: in Cape Cod, in Hammer’s studio, in the film images, alone and with everyone.
By Giulia Rho March 8, 2021 Club Des Femmes https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/portfolio-item/culture-club-watching16/
MUBI is screening A Month of Single Frames (from Mon 8 March) and Vever (from Tues 9 March) to mark International Women’s Day 2021.
To support their programming, MUBI are offering 30 days’ free viewing (starting whenever you choose) of all the films on their platform to Club des Femmes’ readers and friends!
Ways of Seeing with Barbara Hammer
“I am overwhelmed by simplicity. There is so much to see”, recites an ageing Barbara Hammer from her diary. An entry that dates back to 1998, when the filmmaker was conducting a one-month residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with only the dunes and the ocean to keep her company. “I feel compelled to do absolutely nothing. There is nothing to do”, she recounts, as the camera shows us the artist taking a shower outside, in the nude, at ease with her backdrop of sun-scorched sand grass. These moments appear suspended in time, at once very distant from me and very close, like memories of my own from my college years in Boston and weekend escapes to the coast. I find myself wondering how Barbara Hammer could extract these images from my mind, as they soar away from me into the past.
Lynne Sachs, who directed Barbara to read selected excerpts from the diary out loud for her film A Month in Single Frames (2019), edits together the artist’s unused footage with oneiric lyricism, giving us brilliant frames of pure light, extreme closeups of flowers and time lapses of clouds journeying through the expansive American sky. Fractals of colors artificially created by Barbara with rainbow gel flags overlap and fade out into the hues of the scarce vegetation, and the changing sunlight on the dunes. Barbara’s own shadow appears now and then, stretched along the beach, reflected in her own artmaking, a self-inscription that travels to us, in this moment in time, and reminds us of the woman behind the camera, the body around the voiceover. The communion of human and natural, of feminine bodies and flora is a long-standing trope in Barbara Hammer’s filmmaking, appearing since her early shorts Dyketactics (1974) and Menses (1974). Naked women frolic and fuck unperturbed by the open space surrounding them. I often think of them as a Flower Child Eve, who upon eating the forbidden fruit and realising she is naked, instead of covering herself with leaves, shrugs it off, and revels in her own skin.
Bugs, strands of grass and little toys populate A Month of Single Frames, inhabiting it like a doll house, an artificial space that seems to encompass “the expanse called life” as a terminally ill Hammer looks back to it. Like in the most famous still from this film: a little glass contains the whole ocean.
Back when the film was released in 2019, none of us could have imagined the emotional resonance a film about the smallness of life would hold just a year later. And yet, this Thoreauvian Cape Cod, this meditation on the passing of time and the beauty of everyday, now insistently reminds me of my Instagram feed, which, during several lockdowns, has filled with little pleasures and stolen moments of domesticity. The arrangement of fruits in a colourful bowl when the light hits just right, a pet that appears to be smiling at the camera, the corner of a white building slashing the blue sky, can now all bring tears to my eyes. As part of my PhD practice, I spend most days researching images of the banality of beauty, captured by a past generation of feminist filmmakers of which Hammer was part. I survey their movies like a detective, waiting for hints of these lives gone by, and I continually find my own. The re-evaluation of the mundane preached by Thoreau and Whitman and exemplified by the American avant-garde has returned in our habit of documenting days that follow one another in a blur and posting the most fleeting joys online.
The attempt of recounting an experience of solitude through connection reiterates Lynne Sachs’ strategy of making a film with and for Barbara Hammer, repurposing the artist’s unused footage. “You are alone. I am here with you in this film. There are others here with us. We are all together”, Lynne writes, over the image of a stick drawing invisible lines in the sand. I detest that everything reminds me of the pandemic, of the present moment, rather than taking me away from it. But I love the invitation Barbara and Lynne’s collaboration extends to look at the simple and habitual like the richest treasure: “everything waits expectantly to be discovered”.
If A Month of Single Frames dwells on the natural world, Vever (2019) by Deborah Stratman revisits another trope in Barbara Hammer’s repertoire: travel. The original footage was shot in 1975 by Barbara in Guatemala, at the end of a motorcycle trip that got her away from the Bay Area, heartbreak and a troubled affair. “I needed to get away and drive”, she tells Stratman over the phone; a tremor in her voice betrays her old age. The film is bursting with energy and color, the market streets are busy, and the soundtrack of drums and flutes urges us to search the crowd expectantly, as if Barbara herself was about to appear straddling her BMW motorcycle like the heroine in an action movie. Instead, a text runs over the screen, a testimony of defeat, and failure of the artist to capture reality. We discover from the voice over that Hammer never printed the film herself because she had no “political content or personal context” to justify spending what little money she had. What motivated her to shoot this film in the first place? “I left without an intention, except to drive”, she recounts. Once the film ran out, she simply turned around and went back to San Francisco, as if the camera was the navigator.
Tribal etchings appear in answer to these doubts. The music now assumes a magical or religious tone and the human world succumbs to the jungle. It is almost an invocation, a response to the inability to master art that the text on the screen has been telling us about. In fact, the music sounds familiar. I wonder if I’m getting hypnotized, or if a memory inside me is stirring. Where have I heard it? Before I can find an answer, images from the market return. Except now it’s the end of the day, it is quieter. Over the phone, Barbara hurriedly tells Stratman that she needs to go. The screen is already black. She truly has gone, too far for us to reach her. And yet the quote we are left with reads: “great Gods cannot ride little horses”, a Haitian proverb that immediately reminds me of a picture I saw of Barbara sitting on her bike, a beautiful, powerful butch iconography. And she doesn’t feel so far anymore.
I barely have the time to smile to myself when Maya Deren’s name appears in the credits. The music that sounded so familiar is quoted from Meshes in the Afternoon, coincidentally the film that Hammer credits in her biography Hammer! (2015)as her major inspiration for becoming a filmmaker. And so, all the pieces of the film fall into place: the tribal designs, the Haitian references, the meditations on art and power. They are from Maya Deren’s own practice, and especially her religious beliefs. Barbara might have embarked on her journey to South America alone and hurting, but Stratman’s film retrospectively gives her companionship. Vever connects three generations of women and offers them to us. As we’ve learnt in Sachs’ film, we are alone together.
In voodoo tradition, which Deren studied and practiced, everything is connected unpredictably and non-hierarchically. These divine linkages are evoked through drawings like the ones that appear in the film, in fact homonymously called ‘vevers’. Once again, I can’t help thinking about our contemporary summoning practice. How we engage in invocations of another that we cannot see, who isn’t sharing our space and yet we believe to be present, at the other end of our technology. Vever opens with a loud dialing tone, a wait, before Hammer picks up the call and Stratman asks: “can you hear me okay?”. How familiar this ritual of connection has become to us all, endlessly trapped in Zoom waiting rooms repeating vocabulary from a séance. “Just barely”, replies Hammer, as the film shows her hand receiving a bowl of soup from an Indigenous woman. She is there, physically preserved in the film, in the company of Maya Deren’s words and music. And I wonder if the whole film isn’t an invocation of them, for their art to reach us today. I spend so much time with them and artists like them for my PhD that I have come to consider them friends. They aren’t, after all, that much further in time and space than my real-life friends, isolated together as we are.
Watching these films on the occasion of International Women’s Day I am left hopeful of the connections we are able to draw. Like the intricate and vibrant designs the women in Vever weave in their tapestries and clothes, so we are tethered to one another across location and generation. Surely our political practice has evolved and expanded, but we still have so much in common with the women who have come before us. I often think of philosopher Luce Irigaray’s reminder that “we already have a history” (Sexes and Genealogies, 19), and her warning against being led to believe that the past is rags rather than riches. We need to cultivate our genealogy, reworking the old in order to create something new, much like Sachs and Stratman do in their collaboration with Hammer. The possibilities to easily access their movies on MUBI is an opportunity to witness such history and interact with it. Our contemporary digital feminism can help make invisible bodies and stories visible and part of a larger discourse, like a whole ocean in a glass of water.
DIRECTED BY Trinh T. Minh-ha and Lynne Sachs with Barbara Hammer
A film from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is paired with a contemporary work that is not in the collection. The two works resonate with timeless, conceptual connections.
Whose film is it? Contemporary artists Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lynne Sachs, and the late Barbara Hammer address various forms of truth-telling and collaboration in cinema. Minh-ha challenges traditional ethnographic films, drawing attention to ways they are conspicuously shaped by the storyteller’s colonial standpoint. Sachs and Hammer elevate the possibility of shared authorship by conceiving a film shaped by Sachs’s vision of Hammer’s material.
Screening right here for free beginning at 10 am (CDT) April 20 until May 4.
MUBI, the go-to film subscription service, has revealed their list of films for March. The list includes Notturno (2020), a superb documentary by the award-winning filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi. To accompany Notturno, MUBI will also stream Rosi’s Boatman (1993), Below Sea Level (2008), and El Sicario, Room 164 (2010).
March for MUBI will also include Chloé Zhao’s debut film Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Whilst also adding two films, The Girl (1968) and Binding Sentiments (1969), by feminist Hungarian director Márta Mészáros who is celebrating her 90th birthday this year.
The current list of films on MUBI in March 2021.
1 March | The Imperialists are Still Alive! | Zeina Durra
2 March | Chinese Puzzle | Cédric Klapisch | The Spanish Apartment Trilogy
3 March | Inflatable Sex Doll of The Wastelands | Atsushi Yamatoya | Keiko Sato: Pinku Maverick
aemi’s second Year in Review programme continues to wrestle with the impact and consequences of this particular moment in time while also showcasing some of the best international artist moving image works that have helped sustain us through a period of profound change. The films in both Year in Review programmes evolve thematically; where the first programme largely dealt with a more singular psychological space: pursuits of personal development often pointing to stimulation and isolation survival tactics, Programme 2 suggests some pathways to a future defined by collective forms of participation.
We begin then with Onyeka Igwe’s No Archive Can Restore You effectively interlinking concerns common to the two programmes. Several of the films in this programme speak to the potential of spaces that connect people, considering also the roles of interlinking past and present communities within these spaces, and the future value and affect of culture developing within these environments. Music also continues to play a significant part in this programme, however the emphasis now is on highlighting togetherness through creativity and publicness, and through shared experiences of political resistance, intent and play.
This programme is available in the Republic of Ireland
A special thank you to LUX, London, and to Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago vdb.org, supporting partner of this screening
Works featured No Archive Can Restore You – Onyeka Igwe (2020, 5 min 54 sec) A Month of Single Frames – Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer (2019, 14 min) Lore – Sky Hopinka (2019, 10 min 16 sec) Queering di Teknolojik – Timothy Smith (2019, 8 min 30 sec) Seize Control of the Taj Mahal – Glenn Belverio (1991, 12 min) Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical – Rhea Storr (2020, 11 min) They Parlaient Idéale – Laure Prouvost (2019, 28 min 30 sec)
about aemi on demand aemi-on-demand is an online platform through which aemi makes curated programmes of experimental film and artist moving image work available to Irish audiences. This initiative increases and diversifies access to aemi programming and guarantees artists’ revenue for their work outside the context of in-person events. Programmes on aemi-on-demand will remain live for a fixed duration on a long-term basis, thereby giving audiences the time necessary to engage with a rich variety of content.
http://www.kinorebelde.com/lynne-sachs-complete-filmography/ Kino Rebelde has created a retrospective that traces a delicate line connecting intimacy, power relations, violence, memory, migration, desire, love, and war in Lynne’s films. By looking at each of these works, we can see a director facing her own fears and contradictions, as well as her sense of friendship and motherhood. Moving from idea to emotion and back again, our retrospective takes us on a journey through Sachs’ life as a filmmaker, beginning in 1986 and moving all the way to the present.
With the intention of allowing her work to cross boundaries, to interpret and to inquire into her distinctive mode of engaging with the camera as an apparatus for expression, we are delighted to present 37 films that comprise the complete filmmography, so far, of Lynne Sachs as visual artist and filmmaker. Regardless of the passage of time, these works continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception.
About Kino Rebelde
Kino Rebelde is a Sales and Festival Distribution Agency created by María Vera in early 2017. Its exclusively dedicated to promotion of non-fiction cinema, hybrid narratives and experimental.
Based on the creative distribution of few titles by year, Kino Rebelde established itself as a “boutique agency”, working on a specialized strategy for each film, within its own characteristics, market potential, niches and formal and alternative windows.
This company supports short, medium and long feature films, from any country, with linear or non-linear narratives. They can be in development or WIP, preferably in the editing stage.
The focus: author point of view, pulse of stories, chaos, risk, more questions, less answers, aesthetic and politic transgression, empathy, identities, desires and memory.
Kino Rebelde was born in Madrid, but as its films, this is a nomadic project. In the last years María has been living in Lisbon, Belgrade and Hanoi and she’ll keep moving around.
About María Vera
Festival Distributor and Sales Agent born in Argentina. Founder of Kino Rebelde, a company focused on creative distribution of non-fiction, experimental and hybrid narratives.
Her films have been selected and awarded in festivals as Berlinale, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, New York FF, Hot Docs, Jeonju IFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sarajevo FF, Doclisboa and Viennale, among others.
María has a background as producer of socio-political and human rights contents as well as a film curator.Envelope
Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances.
Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with renowned musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project.
Between 1994 and 2009, Lynne directed five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany – sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own perception.
Over the course of her career, she has worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha.
Women in Experiment: Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer 02/15/2021 Rosendale, NY
The Rosendale Theatre is excited to offer the program Women in Experiment: Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer from March 12-14. March is Women’s History Month in the U.S., and International Women’s Day is observed across the planet on March 8.
Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer are both major American filmmakers who have influenced visual and filmic arts in several wide spheres. Carolee Schneemann was known for her multi-media works (film, performance, installation, painting) on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. Barbara Hammer, feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema, made over 90 moving image works as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages and drawings.
Both filmmakers were friends and mutual admirers, born in the same year and died within 10 days of one another. Their connections to our local area (including the Women’s Studio Workshop, the Woodstock Film Festival, and the Rosendale Theatre) are maybe more poignant for us locally, but their international reach as artists and mavericks speaks freedom and creativity out loud and in all languages.
WOMEN IN EXPERIMENT: CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN AND BARBARA HAMMER
THE PROGRAM SCHEDULE:
March 12-14 with SELECT FILMS AVAILABLE until March 16.
Saturday, March 13: TWO PANEL DISCUSSIONS through the Rosendale Theatre Live streaming.
Carolee Schneemann Panel Discussion, live at 4 pm EST on March 13
Barbara Hammer Panel Discussion, live at 7 pm EST on March 13
Sunday March 14 | 2 – 6 PM | $10 In-Theatre Media Gallery & Short Films AT THE THEATRE
Rosendale Theatre’s walk-through media gallery. Timed entry tickets available: Pond and Waterfall (1982), Lesbian Whale (2015) (Barbara Hammer); Plumb Line (1968-71), Vulva’s School (1995) (Carolee Schneemann) Safety Protocols for In-Theatre Event:
Capacity is limited
Timed entries into program
Temperatures taken at door
Masks must be worn
Social distancing enforced
ONLINE FILMS PACKAGE or Individual Films Available:
Full Package: (good from March 12-14) $30 or $5 each movie.
Fuses(Carolee Schneemann; 1964-67, 29:37, color silent)
Kitch’s Last Meal(Carolee Schneemann; 1973-76, 54:11, color, sound)
The Great Goddess(Barbara Hammer; 1977, 22:16 b&w sound)
Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor: A NY Subway Tape(Hammer, 1985, 12:39, color sound)
Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS(Barbara Hammer; 1986, 7:42, color sound)
Catscan(Schneemann; 1988, 12:46, color sound)
Still Point(Barbara Hammer; 1989, 9:14, color sound)
Americana I Ching Apple Pie(Schneemann; 2007, 16:37, color sound)
Infinity Kisses(Schneemann: 2008, 9:18, color sound)
Maya Deren’s Sink (Hammer; 2011, 29:08, color sound)
Stand Alone Movie: (good from March 12-16)
Welcome to This House( Barbara Hammer; 2015; 78:54, color sound) $12
Fuses & Infinity Kisses
Part of the full package above, March 12-14.
Stand alone, March 15-16, both movies for $12.
A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (Lynne Sachs; 2019, 14 min) (available to U.S. audiences only) $5
CLICK HERE to preorder tickets or watch when available.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS:
Carolee Schneemann October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019
Carolee Schneemann was born in Pennsylvania, and received a BA in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and MFA from the U of Illinois. She was based locally, living at the line between New Paltz and Rosendale, in an 18th century Huguenot farmhouse, about 3 miles from the Rosendale Theatre.
“Carolee Schneemann is one of the most important artists of the postwar period. Her work in a range of media—painting, film, video, dance and performance, constructions and installations, the written word, and assemblage—presents an unparalleled catalogue of radical aesthetic experimentation.” —notes on the publication Carolee Schneemann Unforgivable
investigations into gender and, in her own words, “forbidden aspects of the female experience” laid the groundwork for much feminist art of the 1980s and 90s.
“Prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire.” — Jan Avgikos, Artforum
“Carolee Schneemann was a visionary. She challenged taboos and was undaunted by censorship, including cancelled screenings of her 1967 film Fuses, bans on imagery documenting her 1975 performance Interior Scroll, and attacks on her later political work… Her language is the visceral, yet intensely political, language of the body, of gesture, of sensuality and eroticism. Even today, she remains radical.” — Joy Garnett, National Coalition Against Censorship
“A feminist visionary and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century.” _The New York Times
Her work has been exhibited around the world, she has received numerous international awards, and she published several books and taught at many institutions.
Barbara Hammer, May 15, 1939 – March 16, 2019
In the early 1970s Hammer studied film at San Francisco State University. After seeing Maya Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon, she was inspired to make experimental films about her personal life. After coming out as a lesbian she “took off on a motorcycle with a super-8 camera” and in 1974 filmed Dyketactics, widely considered to be one of the first lesbian films.
Hammer sought to deconstruct and disempower the narratives and structures that oppress women in general and lesbians in particular. From her earliest experimental work, her films are playfully and relentlessly challenging of accepted norms and taboos.
In Barbara’s words, “As a visual artist who primarily uses film and video in experimental, nonlinear time based work, my practice includes performance, installation and digital photography. I embrace critical and formal complexity while promoting an active and engaged audience. Thematically, my work deconstructs a cinema that often objectifies or limits women. My work makes these invisible bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural record for future generations.”
Barbara received over 50 career awards and honors, and more in individual film awards and grants. Besides her extensive body film and video works, Barbara published several books and many articles.
“Hammer prefers the term ‘actionary’ to ‘visionary’ in describing the work of other queer artists she has documented and promoted over the decades. On the basis of this show, I’d say both terms apply to her.” – Holland Cotter, New York Times
“A testament to the singular combination of sincerity and irreverent humor that characterizes [Hammer’s] sex-positive feminism. . . . Hammer’s work reminds us that visibility is a political act.” – Artforum (review of Hammer’s book, Evidentiary Bodies)
“Barbara Hammer is a true cinematic pioneer; her tremendous body of work continues to inspire audiences and artists alike.” —Jenni Olson, LGBT film historian
Primarily based in New York City, Barbara spent time in the Hudson Valley/Catskills area. She exhibited at the Woodstock Film Festival, SUNY Ulster, and the Rosendale Theatre.
ABOUT THE FILMS:
Fuses(Carolee Schneemann; 1964-67, 29:37, color silent) Schneemann’s self-shot erotic film remains a controversial classic. “The notorious masterpiece… a silent celebration in colour of heterosexual love making. The film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, superimposition and layering of abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself… Fuses succeeds perhaps more than any other film in objectifying the sexual streamings of the body’s mind” — The Guardian, London
Kitch’s Last Meal (Carolee Schneemann; 1973-76, 54:11, color, sound) This film documents the routines of daily life while time passes, a relationship winds down, and death closes in.
The Great Goddess (Barbara Hammer; 1977, 22:16 b&w sound)
Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor: A NY Subway Tape (Hammer, 1985, 12:39, color sound) Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York City Subway Tape finds Barbara Hammer (wearing a mask made of subway maps) conducting gonzo interviews with subway riders, getting their thoughts on the city, their fellow passengers, and navigating public space.
Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS (Barbara Hammer; 1986, 7:42, color sound) “I first heard of AIDS in 1985 when I was teaching at Columbia College in Chicago. I noticed the strange and inflammatory articles in the newspapers and I asked my students to collect hysteric headlines for me. And so I began my work on Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS. I examined the public ignorance, stigmatization, and just plain wrong attitudes towards this new illness. By making a snow storm of newspaper clippings I could show what a ‘snow job’ the media was making.” — Barbara Hammer
Catscan(Schneemann; 1988, 12:46, color sound) Catscan is a group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief and spirits of the dead. It sustains aspects of Schneemann’s previous works built with dream instruction, positing the interchange of intimacy and physicality, the erotic and the obscene, the incubation of dream enactment. Catscan centers on the death of a beloved cat as a means to ritualize more universal mourning and to bring forward ghosts of the past. As a ritual consecration, Schneemann, blindfolded, dances out of 20 yards of red fabric wound around her body.The performance, which had a duration of approximately 90 minutes and variously featured 5 to 8 performers, included a slide projection system, 15 video monitors, ladders, furniture, suitcases, and debris.
Still Point(Barbara Hammer; 1989, 9:14, color sound) Still Point whirls around a point of centeredness as four screens of home and homelessness, travel and weather, architecture and sports signify the constant movement and haste of late twentieth century life. “At the still point of the turning world, that’s where the dance is,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem of Four Quartets. Hammer seeks a point of quiet from which all else transiently moves.
Americana I Ching Apple Pie (Schneemann; 2007, 16:37, color sound) Writes Schneemann: “The ‘Americana I Ching Apple Pie’ recipe was first enacted in my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972. Unfortunately, the original footage disappeared with the man doing the documentation who may have been working for the CIA. The next presentation was May ’77, as a cooking event for the Heresies Magazine performance and jumble sale benefit. With the exception of a dozen apples, flour, maple syrup, and eggs which I brought, all the cooking ‘material,’ utensils, and props were discovered in the jumble. Objects which functionally approximated actual cooking utensils were used: nails, hammers, an arrow, a flower pot, ball bearings, rags, a watering can. The cook’s apron was a ripped mini skirt with which I covered my hair. As I state in the performance, ‘traditionally you need an apron, but it doesn’t matter where you put it.’
Infinity Kisses (Schneemann: 2008, 9:18, color sound) Infinity Kisses – The Movie completes Schneemann’s exploration of human and feline sensual communication. It incorporates extracts of the original 124 self-shot 35mm color slide photo sequence, Infinity Kisses, in which the expressive self-determination of the ardent cat was recorded over an eight-year period. Infinity Kisses – The Movie recomposes these images into a video, in which each dissolving frame is split between its full image and a hugely enlarged detail.
Maya Deren’s Sink(Hammer; 2011, 29:08, color sound) Maya Deren’s Sink explores Deren’s concepts of space, time and form through visits and projections filmed in her Los Angeles and New York homes. The project began after Hammer discovered a sink formerly owned by Deren at Anthology Film Archives and embarked on an homage to the “Mother of American Experimental Cinema.”
Hammer re-imagines Deren’s film locations of the 1940s in the present, providing entry into intimate spaces and former times, reclaiming the places that inspired the influential filmmaker. Hammer interweaves the performance of an actor, as well as the voices of the current home owners, Judith Malina, Carolee Schneemann, Ross Lipmann and others. The meditation on space and architecture investigates the relationship between private and public spheres, creating a unique architectural portrait of Deren.
The experimental soundtrack is created from the music of Teiji Ito (Deren’s third husband), Tavia Ito, and Teiji’s daughter.
Welcome to This House (Barbara Hammer; 2015; 78:54, color sound) Welcome to This House is a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the US, Canada, and Brazil believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide “missing documents” of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poetry is beautifully performed by Kathleen Chalfant and with the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara brings Bishop into our lives with new facts and unexpected details.
“As an artist I believe that the architectural structures in which I live and work influence the art I make. I went in search of Bishop’s homes to explore the buildings and the poetry and paintings she made in them. This quest took me to her childhood home in Nova Scotia, to Camp Chequesset on Cape Cod, to Vassar College where she went to school, and to her homes in Key West, Brazil, Cambridge and Boston.
“Bishop was in the closet to the outside world, but she seemed to have as many lovers as she had homes. I globe trotted on her trail and found more and more female lovers emerging from interviews with friends, colleagues, critics and poets. Bishop was a lusty woman and I respect that, but writing openly of these experiences wasn’t possible due to her need for privacy propelled by the homophobia of the times. In addition, and maybe partly responsible for her reticence, was the childhood trauma she experienced of her mother’s breakdown and confinement in an institution. The understanding of this significant loss following the death of her father when she was an infant, and her conflicted need both to stay still and to move brought me to a closer reading of published and unpublished poems where I found intimate disclosures in her poetry.” — Barbara Hammer
A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (Lynne Sachs; 2019, 14 min) In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal.
In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
“While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film. My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.” — Lynne Sachs
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Saturday, March 13, 4:00 pm: Panel on Carolee Schneemann
Moderator: Rachel Churner, Director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. She is also an art critic, editor, and faculty member at Eugene Lang College at The New School. She owned and operated Churner and Churner, a contemporary art gallery in New York, from 2011 to 2015.
Peggy Ahwesh, Filmmaker. A true bricoleur, she has produced a broad range of works through the approaches of storytelling, improvisation, image appropriation and visual essay forms in an inquiry into cultural identity and the role of the female subject. Recent shows include: Queer Paranormal, Usdan Gallery, Bennington, VT; Private Lives, Public Spaces; MoMA; and Unsettled States, Center for New Media, Baruch College. Ahwesh is represented by Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn.
Dr. Juan Carlos Kase, Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research, which has been published in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Millennium Film Journal, The Moving Image, and OCTOBER, concerns the overlapping aesthetic, historical, and political registers of experimental cinema, documentary, art history, performance, and popular music within American subcultures.”
Erin Zona, Director Women’s Studio Workshop. Worked with Carolee before her death to republish Schneemann’s 1972 book: Parts of a Body House Book.
Parts of a Body House Book was originally published in 1972 by Beau Geste Press, which was run by Felipe Ehrenberg in Devon, England. This reprinting is a facsimile of Carolee’s personal copy from the first edition. Her intentions were to paint the back cover of each book and create a new set of hand interventions for the present day. This publication was in production at the time of her death in 2019. All hand interventions including corrections, stamping, staining, drawing, and highlighting were recreated to the artist’s exact wishes. Each copy in this edition is signed by Carolee’s beloved feline, La Niña, using a pigment mixed from beet juice and dirt gathered from the grounds of Carolee’s eighteenth century farmhouse in New Paltz, NY.
This book includes the first publishing of an excerpt from Schneemann’s Sexual Parameters Chart, Americana I Ching Apple Pie, film positives from two of Carolee’s films, notes and sketches on Kinetic Painting, a very special menstrual-blood-blotted paper work, and more.
In the exhibition catalog for her retrospective Kinetic Painting, Schneemann writes, “Parts of a Body House Book (1972) is a prototype for my big book. Each element in this edition was culled from mounds of related material. It is a releasing of the recent past into the present. A unitary life view – all about the same thing… and I can’t say what IT IS. But see it, live it.”
Saturday, March 13 at 7:00 pm: Panel on Barbara Hammer
Moderator: Sally Berger, film and media curator, writer, and art consultant in experimental, non-fiction and independent film, video installation and digital media. She is a Visiting Instructor, Visual Studies, Haverford College. Previously, she worked at The Museum of Modern Art (1986 -2016) as a curator in the Department of Film and co-founder and director of Documentary Fortnight, an international festival of non-fiction film and media (2001 – 2016). At the Museum she organized numerous contemporary film and media exhibitions, retrospectives and artist presentation series. She received an MA from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts in Cinema Studies and a BA in Media Studies from Fordham College at Lincoln Center.
Florrie Burke, Executor and Director of Barbara Hammer Art Legacy.
She is an international expert on human trafficking, worker exploitation and trauma.
Sarah Keller, associate professor of art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on experimental form, film experience, and feminist issues in cinema. Her book on the career of experimental filmmaker and artist Barbara Hammer, Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame, is forthcoming in Fall 2021 for Wayne State University Press’s Queer Screens series.
Lynne Sachs, Filmmaker. “For more than thirty years, Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” (Edo Choi, Asst. Curator, Museum of the Moving Image)
As of 2020, she has made 37 films. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest have all presented retrospectives of her work. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems in 2019. On the occasion of the January, 2021 virtual theater release of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, the Museum of the Moving Image is currently presenting a career-ranging survey of Lynne’s work.
FILM EVENT AT THE THEATER
In-Theatre Media Gallery & Short Films AT THE THEATRE Sunday March 14, 3-6 pm
Movies on the Screen:
Plumb Line (Schneemann; 1968-71, 14:27, color sound)
Pond and Waterfall (Hammer; 1982, 15:00, color silent)
Vulva’s School (Schneemann; 1995, 7:15, color sound)
Lesbian Whale (Hammer; 2015, 6:35, color sound)
Safety Protocols for In-Theater Event:
Capacity is limited
Timed entries into program
Temperatures taken at door
Masks must be worn
Social distancing enforced
The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance.
Plumb Line(Schneemann; 1968-71, 14:27, color sound)
The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance.
Pond and Waterfall
Pond and Waterfall (Hammer; 1982, 15:00, color silent)”Hiking in Point Reyes National Seashore I came upon a vernal pool with an intriguing and mysterious underwater world. I optically printed swimming underwater to slow the movement to a meditative rhythm. I hoped that the appreciation of the clarity and beauty of water would lead us to better protect it.” — Barbara Hammer
“The camera eye is like an amphibian that sees on two levels in its journey from underwater in a safe pond down to a violent, turbulent ocean. Early in the silent film shot north of San Francisco we see an homage to Monet’s Nymphiades in the faded raspberry color of the step-printed underwater lilies. The painterly effects of the printing make the water seem viscous. Pushing through clouds of fish eggs, fronds and algae, the camera establishes a sense of intimacy and connection in a natural ecosystem. But this amiable underwaterscape acquires ominous overtones as the camera/amphibian surfaces. Splashes strike the lens, and the rock of the ocean surf is destabilizing and disorienting. One of the most provocative foreshadowing ambiguities occurs when the half-submerged camera tracks the tip and slosh of the horizon, echoing the mood change from underwater confidence to vulnerability to natural forces, a passage from balance to defiance.” — Kathleen Hulser, “Frames of Passage: Nine Recent Films of Barbara Hammer,” Centre Georges Pompidou
Vulva’s School
Vulva’s School (Schneemann; 1995, 7:15, color sound)
A performance in which Schneemann personifies an irrepressible vulva, which engages two animal hand puppets in a clamorous deconstruction of sexual bias in French semiotics, Marxism, patriarchal religions and physical taboos.
Lesbian Whale
Lesbian Whale(Hammer; 2015, 6:35, color sound)
ROSENDALE THEATRE LOBBY EXHIBIT:
Poster(s), pictures, ephemera courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and the Barbara Hammer Art Legacy, and the book: Parts of a Body House Book, courtesy of the Women’s Studio Workshop:
Front (left) and back (right) covers of Carolee Schneemann, Parts of a Body House Book
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (Lynne Sachs; 2018, excerpt);
Parts of a Body House Book was originally published in 1972 by Beau Geste Press, which was run by Felipe Ehrenberg in Devon, England. This reprinting is a facsimile of Carolee’s personal copy from the first edition. Her intentions were to paint the back cover of each book and create a new set of hand interventions for the
Kinetic Painting present day. This publication was in production at the time of her death in 2019. All hand interventions including corrections, stamping, staining, drawing, and highlighting were recreated to the artist’s exact wishes. Each copy in this edition is signed by Carolee’s beloved feline, La Niña, using a pigment mixed from beet juice and dirt gathered from the grounds of Carolee’s eighteenth century farmhouse in New Paltz, NY.
This book includes the first publishing of an excerpt from Schneemann’s Sexual Parameters Chart, Americana I Ching Apple Pie, film positives from two of Carolee’s films, notes and sketches on Kinetic Painting, a very special menstrual-blood-blotted paper work, and more.
In the exhibition catalog for her retrospective Kinetic Painting, Schneemann writes, “Parts of a Body House Book (1972) is a prototype for my big book. Each element in this edition was culled from mounds of related material. It is a releasing of the recent past into the present. A unitary life view – all about the same thing… and I can’t say what IT IS. But see it, live it.”
“This is not a portrait,” states Lynne Sachs, near the end of Film About a Father Who, after the last in a string of revelations. “This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” Shot on a procession of film and video formats from 1965 though 2019, Sachs’ fascinating new film isn’t therapy, either.
Sachs studied and made films in San Francisco from the mid-’80s through the mid-’90s, bridging the experimental film and documentary worlds. Several of her pioneering works from that period, including The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), are included in the Roxie’s accompanying shorts program “Inquiries Into Self and Others.” A second collection, “Profiles in Courage,” showcases Sachs’ recent work, including A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer).
Sachs’s films are, generally, intentionally unpolished, willfully undercutting the popular presumption that the job of documentaries is to provide answers. Film About a Father Who excavates her (now-elderly) dad’s messy, lifelong love life through a pastiche of loose ends, unanswered questions and unresolved emotions. The film imperceptibly gets deeper and darker as it goes, ultimately amassing the power of an indictment.
Svetlana Cvetko lives in L.A. and shoots all over the world, but her roots as a filmmaker are in the Bay Area. After gravitating to San Francisco from the former Yugoslavia several years ago, Cvetko took film classes and turned her eye from photography to cinematography. She was a quick study, making narrative shorts while shooting local docs like Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning Inside Job, Jacob Kornbluth’s Inequality for All and Jason Cohen’s Silicon Cowboys.
Cvetko’s wonderful and wise second feature as a director, Show Me What You Got, is infused with an L.A. vibe filtered through the French New Wave. Shot by Cvetko in joyous, handheld black-and-white, the movie depicts a ménage à trois between a barista-slash-artist (Cristina Rambaldi), the son of an Italian TV soaps star (Mattia Minasi) and a would-be actor (Neyssan Falahi) postponing his return to Tehran.
A seductive yet mature study of love, freedom and responsibility, Show Me What You Got returns for a virtual run after screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2019. Play dates are limited, so hurry and schedule your play date (pun intended).
Film festivals continue to test and tweak virtual models, trying to conjure the group experience of live screenings and the connective threads of community. The first is a hard nut for anyone—even Sundance—to crack. This year’s SF Urban Film Fest, though, has mastered the second challenge, of bringing people together online to brainstorm on issues and seed solutions.
The theme of this year’s edition is “Wisdom Lives in Places,” which evokes the street-level experience and expertise on offer in the films as well as the accompanying panel discussions. The program “People-Led Solutions: Models of our Shared Future” centers on evictions and homelessness and features local filmmaker Irene Gustafson’s collaboration with the Tenderloin ensemble Skywatchers, reimagining the city, as our own. An inspiring group of activists and advocates convenes after the film program.
Who can resist an event called “Times Like These: An Inflection Point for Food & Our Cities”? The film component includes Aaron Lim, Anson Ho’s uplifting short doc about a young man doing his part and more to keep Chinatown restaurants going through the pandemic. The diverse group talking turkey following the films includes La Cocina Program Director Geetika Agrawal. Bring your wisdom; join the conversation.
