Stone Circles
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Stone Circles

Barbara Hammer
1983, 11 min, b&w and color, sound, 16 mm film on video

Description

Stone Circles is a celebration of ancient pre-patriarchal standing stones, mounds, and circles including Stonehenge and Avesbury.

"In Stone Circles, Hammer really leaves 'nation' as well as 'era' and creates a film poem on the prehistoric stone cultures of Britain. She films dolmens and Druid rock formations, including Stonehenge. An introductory section shows excerpts from books and diagrams which in their way document these stones and explain the stones' origins. Hammer takes the diagrams and playfully animates these scientific 'scale models' by filming colorful arrangements of small stones, clods of dirt, sticks, and grasses. She brings an animism to the subsequent images of the structures themselves, and this animism seems just as valid an approach to the stone formations as the historical/scientific speculations regarding their significance." — Claudia Gorbman, Jump Cut