Sanctus (1990)
By Barbara Hammer
Director: Barbara Hammer Year: 1990 Time: 18 mins Music: Neil Rolnick Sadly reduced by hype machines to a pioneer of "lesbian cinema" (whatever that means), Barbara Hammer has a long career in creative and critical filmmaking, constantly trying to find new narrative forms and technical possibilities to offer the world a personal view on such themes as physical disease, media, gender, sexuality, age or health-care. In her 1990 short Sanctus, the main point seems to be the time-honored dictum of the body as a temple, or, as the author put it, of a body in need of skeletal protection from a corrupting and diseasing environment. Hammer used old x-ray footage, rearranged, colored and orchestrated through optical printing, in order to reveal hidden bodily movements and rhythms in its constant juxtaposition. Rolnick's soundtrack is a characteristically hectic electronic piece in which choral (probably religious) music excerpts are mutilated, stretched, rephrased and rebuilt in ways that sometimes allow us a glimpse of the original materials but more often than not chop them beyond recognition. Its highly artificial and surreal timbres should be known to anyone familiar with Neil Rolnic…
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