Film Collaborations

For a project with the Wexner Center, exhibited posthumously in 2019, Hammer revisited past films, which for financial reasons or other circumstances were never finished. Unable to work on the films herself due to declining health, she invited four filmmakers—Lynne Sachs, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street, and Dan Veltri—to work with her footage and, with the support of the Film/Video Studio, collaboratively create new films. The original footage spans the 1970s–90s and includes an interview with writer Jane Wodening (the first wife of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage); documentation of an AIDS conference for the deaf; 16mm footage from a Guatemalan market; and footage from Dune Shacks, a nearly century-old gathering point for artists and writers (and now an artist residency program) in Provincetown, Massachusetts, that was beloved by Hammer.

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES, BY LYNNE SACHS

2019, 14 min., color, sound, 16mm to HD.

In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.

VEVER (FOR BARBARA), BY DEBORAH STRATMAN

2019, 12 min, 16mm to HD

The film grew out of abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and passed through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti. A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.

SO MANY IDEAS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ALL, BY MARK STREET

2019, 11 min., sound, color, HD.

Street’s film is based on Barbara Hammer’s 1973–85 correspondence with Jane Brakhage, as well as outtakes from her 1974 film Jane Brakhage.