Vever (for Barbara)

Today, the worlds of film and art are obsessed with every dimension of the archive: their official, public documents, but also those lost, forgotten, incomplete. Deborah Stratman brings together footage from an unfinished film shot in Guatemala in 1975 by Barbara Hammer (who died in March 2019) plus the audio of a telephone interview with her about the circumstances of its making, and then combines them with various traces of Maya Deren’s journey as an experimental filmmaker and ethnographer in Haiti: music, drawn symbols, written notes. The result is a hypnotic, multi-layered testament. (Adrian Martin)

In the presence of Deborah Stratman.