An homage to the girls who do it faster, higher and lovelier.
Filter Films
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A moon-faced mask is transformed, made to gleam with vibrant, radiant light and colour. Pulling back, the camera reveals other versions of the mask on the sides of a rotating cube and, on one of the cube’s sides, a Marey-like depiction of human movement is traced and colourized. The control of movement, the creation of a sense of holographic space, and the array of colours are products of the film’s computer animation, using some of the techniques developed by the New York Institute of Technology.
Sunstone
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“A visual trip across the U.S. using an extreme wide angle lens that bends time to the edges while Hammer shoots one frame per foot of visual space traversed. The film’s length, 22 minutes, matches the time it takes sunlight to traverse a petroglyph of nine circles inscribed in rock at Ohaco Canyon, New Mexico. The film opens and closes with shots of this process and the minutes between take us from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate. “Hammer concentrates on the condensation of space and time at high energy locations, from the rock passageways of Ohaco Canyon to the sterile tunnels of the nuclear accelerator building at Stanford University, jumping between ancient and modern corridors of energy. She speeds us across water toward Manhattan’s man-made canyons and cuts to a run across the desert toward ancient ruins. We circle the Statue of Liberty and a butte in the (150) 12 L southwest. We revolve inside the open well of tiered floors in an art museum, and beneath a tiled dome. Are we moving or is the object before us revolving! The play of light, the rhythm of repeated elements, swinging, turning, give and experience of simultaneous perceptions and ……time does bend.” – Jan Ventura, High Performance #41/42, 1988 Original composition: voice/accordion by Pauline Clivoros
Bent Time
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A personal exploratory portrayal of the omnipotence of the Church. Employing both the form and the structure of the music video, “Submission” creates a montage in which the seduction and servility of organized religion are intrinsically fused. Music: The The, Love & Rockets, Nine Inch Nails.
Submission
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The title is almost the whole of any possible description of this hand-painted and photographically step-printed film which exhibits variably shaped small areas of colour (in a dark field) which explode into full frames of textured colour interwoven with scratch patterns that create a considerable sense of interior depth and three-dimensional movement. (SB)
Study in Color and Black And White
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This is a documentary which treats the subject in terms of work, performance and sexuality. In striptease as in dominant cinema, women are presented as sexual spectacle, silent objects to be looked at. This film presents the dancers as speaking subjects, constructing a job profile from the point of view of the women who do the work.
Striptease
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This award-winning film features performances by master storytellers telling tales which together outline the trajectory of a lifespan, from creation, birth, heroic adulthood, to death and regeneration. The stories are inter-cut to effect an almost Proppian analysis of narrative and to suggest an alternative position for women as producers and heroes of culture.
Storytelling
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“Stories from the Land of Cain” is a film about Canada in a time of flux. It chronicles a journey from Batoche, Saskatchewan where the Metis under Louis Riel lost their struggle for independence, to the Plains of Abraham at Quebec where the course was set for the country that would become Canada. The journey breaks off in polyphonic reveries on home, landscapes, and stories from the road; casting back in history, moving forward through the landscape, drifting off in memory. A film about trying to hold a country together with stories.
Stories from the Land of Cain
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Through the use of found footage of a TV image, the practical and moral imperatives of the title are momentarily suspended in a problematic of representation. In affirming the density of the material objecthood at the basis of its “message,” the film foregrounds the question: “What are some of the difficulties encountered in the appropriation of media – particularly those of the mainstream – by and for the pedagogical interest of the Left?”
Stop Darlington
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“‘Still Point’ serves as Barbara Hammer’s definitive reassessment of 70’s cultural feminism. She literally places side-by-side the romantic image of her companion walking and stretching under the sun in a landscape and the gritty realism of a methodical garbage picker on the street of New York city, pushing a shopping cart and moving on to the next waste container. Our world view must encompass both realities, the film indicates. Privilege can’t obscure vision.” – Chick Kleinhans, The Film/Video Showcase Presents the Films of Barbara Hammer
Still Point
