Ｑ：To begin with Vever (for Barbara), it’s stated that the film grew out of abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Can you elaborate on how it all began?
Barbara had received a grant from Wexner that she’d intended to use to finish a number of projects which she’d left uncompleted. But she became too sick to do that. So instead, she reached out to some artists, namely Lynne Sachs, Mark Street, and Dan Veltri, myself included, to see if we’d want to work with the material.
She and I did not know each other, or not well anyways. We’d met once or twice over the years at screenings, but I was not a close friend like some other collaborators, so I was surprised when she reached out. It was surreal to see her name on the caller ID. She’s such a formidable figure.
Her proposal was very open - she trusted me to do what I wanted to with the material. This was instrumental. I wouldn't have agreed to collaborate if the invitation was just about executing her ideas. Other people could have done that much better.
Ｑ：How did the process go?
We had two phone conversations which I requested to record. This was before I ever had seen any of the material, which was film she had shot on a motorcycle trip to Guatemala. She spoke about this trip, and how she was traveling just to move. She didn’t have any intention. There was no particular project in mind… but once she used up the film, she turned around and headed home.
The material she shot was at a market in Chichicastenango which at that time in early 70s, was an indigenous market full of textiles. Barbara became very interested in the weaving and in the stories those weavings contained. In how those histories had been passed down between women for generations. She was curious to know if this tradition of women writing history had changed, if the markets had become globalized, if the women were still weaving or if everyone bought cheap imports now instead.
She knew I had also been a motorcyclist and wondered if I might want to ride down there to film. But I’d sold my motorcycle by then, and as much I’d like to visit Guatemala and the market there, I didn’t want to do it right then. I felt working fast while Barbara was still alive was the most important thing.
Besides, I liked the idea of not shooting any of my own new material, just working with the film she’d shot 50 years ago. I like limitations. And besides, once we had the phone conversations, I knew I could sonically include musings about the market changes.
Ｑ：The film remarkably weaves together three filmmakers’ unique relationships to filmmaking. How do you perceive the Vever drawings that appear as superimposed illustrations throughout the film?
After I had begun speaking with Barbara but before I started editing, I found myself re-reading Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen. This was a book that came out of Deren’s time in Haiti with the Vodoun culture. She had originally been there to make a film. But she abandoned that and wrote this astonishing book instead. Picking up that book just then was a revelation. Bringing Deren into the collaboration relieved the pressure I felt about doing justice to Barbara’s legacy through our dialogue. Once there were three of us, the project solidified. There were so many echoes between Hammer and Deren who were both working outside their own culture, and unable or unwilling to master their material.
The Vevers in the film were taken from the reproductions in Deren’s book, which were drawn by Teiji Ito, her partner for a time. Ito also composed the music to Meshes in the Afternoon which sounds in the film a bit like a ghost. Familiar but displaced. Traditionally in Vodoun, Vevers are drawn on the ground in powder and danced over. The Vever becomes a portal through which the Loa (god) passes in order to ‘ride’ the human ‘horse’ or practitioner. The dancer is ridden, or possessed, by the Loa. I superimpose Vevers in my film to borrow the idea of portal, and the idea of being ridden… in my case by my filmic ancestor sisters, Barbara and Maya.
Ｑ：Let’s talk about your latest film, Last Things. The film draws from philosophical themes and sci-fi tales. Can you elaborate on how these influences started to shape the narrative and themes of your film?
Science-fiction has been an influence since I was a kid. It’s a remarkable genre, as so many genres are, for being able to speak to the socio-political present from an adjacent, but othered nearby. This has always been a philosophical place for me. Not just sci-fi, but the library in general. When I’m being troubled by an idea, like the 7th great extinction for instance, or the psycho-ecological territories it generates…I start reading.
The kernels for the film were two JH Rosny stories: La Mort de la Terre (The Death of the Earth) and Le Xipéhuz. The Boex brothers were way ahead of their time. They co-wrote under the pseudonym Rosny before sci-fi was even a genre, and envisioned non-anthropic alien invaders that don’t necessarily come with any ill intent. They’re just following their own nature, which humans happen to be threatened by.
I thought I was going to make more of a straight-ahead filmic adaptation of these stories, but quickly got side-tracked by the science surrounding evolution, and the incredible ties between minerals and life. So I started wondering what it might be like to have these two idioms, science-fiction and science non-fiction, share the same space.
Ｑ：One of the amazing parts of this film is how sci-fi meets sci-fact, where rocks have their own narrative beyond the human experience. How did the mineral point of view come along in the first place?
The mineral point of view was there from the beginning. In La Mort de la Terre, the encroaching alien force which will succeed mankind are the “Ferromagnetics” – a slowly advancing mineral life form that consumes iron for energy, including iron in blood.
But the bigger catalyst was seeing an exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Vienna which described the theory of mineral evolution. It flipped my understanding of what happens on this planet. When earth formed, there were only a handful of minerals, but through exposure to pressures, atmospheres, and respirating biotic life, the number of mineral types exploded in number. Concurrent with the GOE (Great Oxygenation Event), when the first photosynthesizing cyanobacteria learned how to eat the sun and started outgassing oxygen… there was not only a mass extinction of anaerobes (creatures that live only in the absence of oxygen – which were the primary sort of creatures back then), but also this huge renaissance in mineral varieties.
Life needs minerals. Minerals need life. We are intertwined.
So I tried to figure out how to speak through the prism of minerals. How rocks as the active verbs they are instead of the static nouns we perceive them to be. How to posit rocks as our ancestors. Rocks as texts. Rocks as capable of time frames so alien to us and yet so utterly earthly.
Ｑ：How did the focus on geological ecology and the extreme contrasts between macro and micro changes in time affect the editing of the film? Did the poetic approach to scientific subject matter present any challenges or spark interesting ideas?
The poetic, associative approach is my indigenous editing language. I find it hard to speak in other ways, regardless of subject matter.
I knew the film would contain a mix of macro and micro and I became interested in a conflation or mis-identification of scales. So that, for instance, the shot of a miniscule diatom (which is a photosynthesizing, silica-shelled alga) cuts to an orbiting spacecraft solar panel. Or when clusters of drifting plankton cuts to sedimentary canyon walls, we see in an instant what took billions of years to happen. Millennia of those little plankton drifting after death to the bottom of the sea and stacking up into what eventually become towering walls of biotic sediment. Or a Neolithic henge arrangement of boulders that materializes instantaneously, with a cut, from stars. Film is a good medium to address epic shifts of scale. In space or time.
Ｑ：The film is remarkably shot on 16mm, which is sometimes unimaginable with things like a microscope in laboratory settings. How to capture all these wonderful images? Can you elaborate on your filming process?
I’m curious about the edges of documentary. Where are they? Who defines them? When does documentary slip quietly into fiction, and when is the shift abrupt, declarative…
I like working with 16mm because the process is slow, which seemed right for rocks, and because the medium itself is made of minerals. Light hits minerals suspended in the emulsion and etches them. So it’s a type of stone carving. Its materiality contains a knowing-through-feeling. Knowing through touch should be as relevant and authoritative as empirical, data-based knowing.
These knowing-modes are echoed with the film’s narrators. One a geo-scientist, lecturing, reporting. The other, oracular, spinning her tale.
The image sources are very diverse. I shot using a mix of cameras including an Aaton, an Arri S and a Bolex. For some of the chondrite images, we screwed the Bolex directly onto the microscope mount. But I also did a lot of re-shooting off computer monitors, microscope displays, books and existing archives. That’s why the image source credits are so long.
Ｑ：Music and the sound effects in this film are truly remarkable. How are the sounds like mineral collisions or crystallization, futuristic signal sounds or microtonal soundtrack frequencies in the film produced or recorded?
There are a huge number of sonic sources.
In the rock taxonomy sequence, where the parade of mineral types is accompanied by comedic, alliterative sounds… those are all from a composition by Nicolas Collins who is playing a synthesized trumpet. The composition has so much personality. I love how those sounds are clearly electronic and yet there’s breath in them.
In the sequences when the crystals are growing, the soundtrack there I made from mixing recordings of chafing river ice, glacial movement, squeaking doors and rubbing Styrofoam.
Some sounds I record myself, using a variety of microphones, hydrophones and a geophone. I have a pretty big archive of sounds I’ve recorded over the years at this point. But many sounds are recorded by other field recordists and collected in archives where I find them, including space sound archives.
And of course there’s all the composed music, which might sound a bit like sound effects as it’s primarily electronic. I’m an equal opportunist when it comes to sampling image and sound sources. Material quotations make meaning more dimensional, the way they carry their original use value along with them into the new context.
