Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor2018

Three renowned women artists discuss their passion for filmmaking.

From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place
where she finds grounding and spark.

Awards: “Best of Festival” Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago, 2018.

Screenings: Premiere Documentary Fortnight, Museum of Modern Art, Feb. 20 – 26, 2018; Amherst College; Los Angeles Film Forum; Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles; Other Cinema, San Francisco; Filmoteca Español, Madrid; “Xcèntric” Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Spain; Cosmic Ray Film Festival, Durham, NC; Onion City Film Festival, Chicago; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; DocYard at the Brattle Theater, Boston; Athens Film and Video Festival (Ohio); Edinburgh Film Festival; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, NY; Festival de Curtas Belo Horizonte, Brazil; International Queer Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany; Pacific Film Archive/Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

"Lynne Sachs’ Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an 8-minute triptych of brief encounters with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson filmed at the artists’ homes or studios. Sachs has a really well-attuned photographic eye, and she captures the trio in a series of easygoing domestic situations. The three artists discuss their artistic lives, how they came into their practice, how their gender identities factor in, where their work comes from. It’s a simple premise with intimate results, especially good at giving a sense of the artists’ environments. "  Tyler Maxin, Screen Slate

“I could make the inside of myself show on the outside,” Barbara Hammer says in Lynne Sachs’s documentary Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), explaining how a lighter movie camera, developed in the Sixties, helped her convey intimacy, and thus became a useful, malleable tool of expression. The short, in which Sachs pays a visit to pioneering women artists who used moving image in their practice — Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson — will enjoy a weeklong run as part of “Doc Fortnight,” the Museum of Modern Art’s annual showcase dedicated to nonfiction film.  - Ela Bittencourt, Village Voice

"A similarly brief and similarly enchanting encounter followed with the world premiere screening of Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, (2018) Lynne Sachs’s nine-minute cinematic collage exploring the distinctive styles and approaches of three artists. She delicately weaves them together by positioning them each in a place of familiarity and inner personal power to themselves and their work. Schneemann interacts with a film camera as a prop which becomes an inducer of memories in her Hudson Valley home; documentary maker Barbara Hammer moves around various sources of inspiration in her West Village studio and Gunvor Nelson shares glimpses of the village where she spent her childhood in Sweden. Each artist is gracefully and uniquely introduced via different relationships they have created with themselves, their environments, the filmmaker, and the audience." - Brooklyn Rail