Barbara Hammer is an experimental filmmaker. For she cannot represent lesbianism's difference from and critique of mainstream, heterosexual society using the very language that has served to silence lesbians. Her film practice is characterized by a plurality of form and content: interrogating the relationship between the form of film and that which it represents. For most audiences, this also means that her films are challenging. They do not conform to Hollywood's pleasures of closure and continuity.

Stylistically transcendental, inherently playful, non-teleological, non-linear, and fragmented, Hammer’s works demand and reward a close reading: “I ask my audience to stretch and embrace new forms with each work. Form is as important as content and, indeed, is content itself.”

Hammer’s oeuvre stands in the face of dominant historiography’s ignoring (at best) and erasure (at worst) of marginalized identities. Her preoccupation with the archive, filmic or otherwise, is informed by and in response to the traumatic loss of history as a result of institutional neglect.

Unapologetically honest and undeniably political, the tactile and haptic approach that characterizes Hammer’s work can be framed within a perspective of rewriting that takes place during a process of embodiment and re-appropriation of a female-lesbian gaze, that translates/interprets and transforms the world.

Adopting Maya Deren’s theory of a vertical cinema: a cinema that interrupts the linear perception of progress to make room for celebration, contemplation, and reflection, Hammer embraces a form of filmmaking characterized by a layering of images, sounds and texts.

A housewife until the late '60s, she came out as a lesbian in the 1970s, "took off on a motorcycle with a Super 8 camera" and created the groundbreaking Dyketactics, the first explicit sexual film about lesbian sexuality made by a lesbian. She will continue to strive for a new visual language that defies the conventions of the heteronormative mainstream in her debut feature Nitrate Kisses which draws on reconstruction and counter-archiving to excavate a lost queer history and tackle its lingering censorship. While her second documentary feature, the postmodernist Tender Fictions investigates the idea of “the invisibility of female artists in an art world dominated by men” by shattering the very notion of an autobiographical film.

References:

Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, Alexandra Juhasz

Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame (Queer Screens), Sarah Keller

HAMMER!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, Barbara Hammer

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