OPTICAL NERVES
($19.95 + shipping) One VHS with 4 films:
Optic Nerve 16mm, color and B&W, sound, 16 min., 1985. Score by Helen Thorington.
"An expressionistic use of the optical printer, a
recognition of film as a vertical strip, the inclusion of film as
medium (sprocket holes, frame lines) and process (the inadvertent
slippage, the flow of imagination), the particular and careful frame by
frame printing, and, finally, the content, my grandmother in a nursing
home with one optic nerve functioning, her impending death in a sterile
environment, her role model for me as the artist of the family, and her
inspiring words prompting me to trust in creative experimentation in
this film: 'Do What You Want to Do'- all the elements informing and
forming Optic Nerve."
--Barbara Hammer
Endangered 16mm, color, sound, 19 min., 1988. Score by Helen Thorington.
The Galapagos Islands are featured in Endagered,a
film where blue-footed boobies, seals and iguanas are equated with the
filmmaker herself, who identifies light, life, and experimental film to
be threatened with extinction in the late twentieth century. Every
image is marked and cancelled before it disappears. Even the emulsion
of the film is treated with acid marking its fragility. The film is a
highly effective compilation: image, color, sound building upon each
other, slowly heightening the sense of urgency. Against this mood there
is a reassuring image of a silhouetted woman working at the optical
printer. A strong, competent, fearless woman. Woman documenting,
warning, saving.
"A reflection on the
threatened tradition of filmmaking and the independent filmmaker.
Hammer's formal invention and manipulation of film through devices such
as post-production effects created by optical printing-become the means
for developing new filmic metaphors."
--John Hanhardt, Whitney Biennial Catalogue,1989.
Place Mattes 16mm, color and B&W, sound, 8 min., 1987. Score by Terry Setter.
Explores the space between reaching and touching with
animation and optical printing used to create travelling mattes for
places and confounding the difference between external and internal.
Parisian Blinds 16mm, color and B&W, silent, 6 min., 1984 and Tourist,16mm, color and B&W, sound, 4 min., 1984-5.
These two short films " "Investigates the nature of
spectator perception in an unfamiliar environment. Manipulating the
movement of the dilm direction on the screen much like a camera shutter
and the motion of venetian blinds that open and close, Hammer questions
the perceptual experience of mass tourism as the Bateau Mouche
endlessly circles the Ile de la Cite."
--Kathleen Hulser, Centre Pompidou
