Made with and for Barbara Hammer

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.

Support provided by Wexner Center Film/ Video Studio and Artist Residency Award

Awards:
Jury's Choice Award, Black Maria's 39th Annual Festival Tour - 2020

LUX & Club des Femmes present Evidentiary Bodies: Celebrating Barbara Hammer & Carolee Schneemann, London; 21st Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (Fest CurtasBH), Brazil; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; DocLisBoa, Portugal; Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires, Argentina; MUTA, International Audio Visual Appropriation Festival, Lima, Perú; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Missoula, Montana; Museum of Modern Art Documentary Fortnight 2020; MiradasDoc Festival, Canary Islands, Spain; Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival, Pamplona, Spain; Courtisane Festival, Ghent, Belgium; Oberhausen International Film Festival; Edinburgh International Film Festival.


"As to your text in Hammer film..I though it was wonderful!. It was like a George Landow movie, just talking directly to the audience, in a sublimely wise admission that we are all just mortal human bodies, ...here together for a short while...then all gonna die, like Barbara. It was her talking to us from behind the screen. It was like she was talking to us from beyond the grave, mystical, and yet structural." -- Craig Baldwin

"dearest Lynne <> i L ~ O ~ V ~ E ~ D the Barbara film ~ the gel flags / beach dune shack / birds & flowers & sand & ocean & insects & toys & diary / sounds & voices & text & no electricity or plumbing BUT sun moon waves wind plants body colors & film ~ so tender & present ~ loving" -- Bradley Eros

"What a quiet, contemplative work about filmmaker cooperation and community. Your words about hers and yours and ours seem so apt to this moment, and trying to make sense of the death of someone trying to make sense of their own dying, who made work about this herself and with us. I really appreciate your time and energy and feeling in this, and for our community more generally (especially the snippet about 60: lovely)." -- Alex Juhasz

"The bits of conversation between the two of you were wonderful, down to business, as two artists together, who have work to do. I found this intensely moving. Also the colored gels and the playfulness with them, delightful, magical, expansive, and poetic. Thank you so much for making this film, for and with Barbara, what a tribute to your friendship with her." -- Lynn Kirby

"I saw your film A Month of Single Frames. I am speechless. Such a sensitive, brilliant work of art and document! I want to see it many times over. I feel it is truly special." -- Christopher Harris

"Melding past and present, Sachs edited the footage and reading into a meditation on the small treasures of life before the "sadness of departure" made inevitable by death. The images in the movie work with simplicity to establish layers of rich beauty and complexity. Water playfully dances in and out of the sunshine and colored gel flags reflect rainbow-colored squares onto the raked sand dunes. Amid a background of rustling reeds, panoramic vistas, and sunsets captured in single-frame shots, Hammer wonders: 'Is this why we make busy? So, we don't have time to contemplate this endless expanse called life?' With lines of poetry written by Sachs sporadically overlaid, the piece takes on significance as a poignant memorial to Hammer by a friend." Daily Princetonian, by Noa Wollstein, Feb. 17, 2020

trailer:
https://vimeo.com/328499915