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Vever (for Barbara)

Deborah Stratman

2019 00:12:00 Guatemala, United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:316mm film
Tags:
Art History, Artist Portraits, Autobiography, Documentary, Expedition/Travel, Experimental Film, Feminism, Gender, Labor, Landscape, Memory, Myth, Time

Description

A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Each woman extends her reach to a subject she is outside of. Vever grew out of the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti.

A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke Loa, or god.

About Deborah Stratman

Filmmaker Deborah Stratman works in a territory between experimental and documentary genres.  In her films and frequent work in other media, including drawing, sculpture, sound, photography and small press, she explores the history, uses, mythologies and control of highly varied landscapes, from Muslim Xinjiang China to suburban southern California. Her recent work addresses American constructs of Freedom, the junction between technology and faith and contemporary locations of the supernatural. Stratman teaches in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Stratman was the subject of a mid-career retrospective,The Thing Unnamed, at MoMA New York in 2013.