Vever (Deborah Stratman, 2019)
Added 2019-03-09 22:13:51 +0000 UTC
Deborah Stratman's lovely new film is a collaboration with Barbara Hammer, comprised mostly of footage that Hammer shot in Guatemala in 1975 but never fashioned into a completed work. This material is both observational and incredibly well-composed, exhibiting the lyrical quality of a film like Bruce Baillie's Valentin de las Sierras, showing a particular way of looking at an environment without trying to pin it down or capture its truth. This associational mode is supported by Stratman's editing, which provides a sense of place but doesn't render the footage anthropological or explanatory.
Vever is a film about this precise problem, the failure of knowledge to cohere and the complex problem of looking in on a different culture. On the soundtrack, Stratman and Hammer have a phone conversation in which Hammer explains that she never found a personal or an aesthetic connection to the material, and so she couldn't make it into a complete film. Throughout Vever, we also hear Teiji Ito's soundtrack for Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, and see quotations from Deren's Haiti notebooks. In the quotes, Deren describes being overwhelmed by the task of filming Haitian culture, and discovering that her inability to find a non-appropriative stance towards her subjects led her to abandon the film she was making there.
In a sense, Deren, Hammer, and Stratman are all working together on a document that implicitly argues that an artist often grows more from the work that she does not complete. Completion implies definition, a totalizing gaze, that these artists finally discovered was antithetical to the encounters themselves.
