Tender Fictions opens with the statement “Construct an autobiography before someone does it for you”, signaling the central theme of the film: a construction of the self. 

Hammer tackles this question head-on, in keeping with her playful, non-linear, and experimental approach, she chooses performativity, fabulation, and self-referentiality as a means to self-construction. Concocting an aural and visual collage comprised of photos of past and current lovers, quotes from feminist texts, home videos, interviews with family and friends, television programs and even citing her own films including footage from her earliest works from the late 1960s: Schizy, Death of a Marriage, Yellow Hammer, and Contribution to Light. Functioning as an open-ended archive: these images trace the development of her career and provide visual evidence of her life and work.

In an effort to restore a lost or neglected aspect of history, Hammer situates her own lesbianism within a complex amalgam of personal, cultural, political, and familial lore and thus produces an unmistakably key contribution to the construction of lesbian history.

“If I have put a “lesbian life” on the screen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is to have put an unfixed, transparent, morphing character as much influenced and made by the times in which she/he/we/I/you live as determined by illusory self-construction.” (Barbara Hammer, HAMMER!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life)

Bouchra Assou
Film programmer and archivist
English market developer at Tënk