“When I was young the absence of the past was a terror.” – Derek Jarman

In Hammer’s work the archive functions as a lieu de memoire, opening the possibility for an encounter with history that places the past in direct dialogue with the present. Similarly, Nitrate Kisses isn’t interested in a re-writing of history but is somewhat concerned with how history is created, recorded, and preserved, whose stories are told and how and whose are left out, on the margins, in other words, it is a response to an archive that is characterized as much by absence as by presence.

Nitrate Kisses juxtaposes sequences of marginalized identities that include older lesbians, an interracial gay couple, and an S&M scene between two lesbians of color, interweaving them with scenes from one of the earliest queer films in the US Lot in Sodom (1933). Thoroughly discursive, hyper-textual, and haptic, the film undercuts scenes of free expression of sexuality with the repression, obstruction, and erasure which governed its past such as excerpts of the Hays Code, the highly conservative code which brought about a prohibition of any depiction of “sexual perversion” in films. In a similarly experimental approach, Hammer coalesces the temporality and materiality of the medium with the corporeality depicted on screen. Rejecting Derrida’s claim of the impossibility of archiving memory, Hammer instead finds refuge and freedom in Maya Deren’s notion of verticality by layering images to convey a cascading of emotions and sensuous explorations of the body.

In her search for traces of a fragmented queer past, Hammer effectively orchestrates a kinetic and temporal disruption that results in the safekeeping of a future for queer generations to come.

“The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”  (Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power - Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)

Bouchra Assou
Film programmer and archivist
English market developer at Tënk