From our colleagues at Psyche comes a beautiful short film by Lynne Sachs that is a decades-long collaboration with the late pioneering feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer. From the Psyche writeup: In 1998, the pioneering US feminist artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) spent a month at an artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Feeling “compelled to do absolutely nothing” while living in a dune shack without running water or electricity, Hammer documented her solitude with a journal, a tape recorder and a 16mm film camera. For decades, these materials remained in her personal archive, until, as Hammer was nearing the end of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 6, 2024The fourth, and final, of this year’s Wavelengths shorts programs returned to the curatorial logic of the opening night, bringing together half a dozen disparate sensibilities based on formal, rather than thematic, common ground—in this case, their shared interest in performance. With one exception, the coherence here was more immediate than in the first slate’s buried interest in image production, though the styles of performance deployed across these works bear little resemblance to one another. The program began with Zachary Epcar’s Billy, a quick, cool sip of Michael Robinson-aid recounting the domestic unease experienced by its eponymous male lead (Peter […]
by Phil Coldiron on Oct 3, 2019March 16, 2019: Barbara Hammer died today. On this sad occasion we’re reposting this article from our Fall, 2018 edition — a conversation this extraordinary filmmaker at Temple University with Elisabeth Subrin, Sarah Drury, and a number of attending students. It’s a talk that covers her early years as an artist, her process for making work, and, finally, her thoughts on illness and end of life. *** On May 2, 2018, legendary filmmaker Barbara Hammer was honored at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she was awarded its Department of Film and Media Arts Annual Tribute Award, selected by the film […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 17, 2018One thing independent feature films often aren’t able to deal with is very recent history. Films take so long to get developed, financed and produced, and by the time they arrive, whatever proximity they once had to the zeitgeist can be a step removed, which makes the exceptions to this problem thrilling. In this issue, Vadim Rizov interviews director Shevaun Mizrahi about her documentary, Distant Constellation, featuring the residents of a nursing home in Istanbul overshadowed by mega construction sites. Mizrahi shot the film over many years, and as news breaks now about Turkey’s currency crisis—which has its roots in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 17, 2018