Director of Photography
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
Self
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
Queer Genius is a cinematic exploration of four visionary queer artists breaking down barriers in their creative fields as they confront fame, failure, censorship, family, gender, and sexuality. The film embraces the communal possibilities of "genius" from a particularly queer perspective crossing genre and generational perspective. It features intertwined portraits of Eileen Myles, Barbara Hammer, Jibz Cameron, and Black Quantum Futurism.
Self
Filmmaker Alyssa Bolsey stumbles on a treasure trove of vintage cameras, old film reels, fading photos, technical drawings and boxes of documents that belonged to her great-grandfather Jacques Bolsey. Among the many boxes, she spots an old movie camera with the word "Bolex" embossed on its side and a dangling tag with the date, "1927." Entranced, she embarks on a journey to reveal how Jacques aimed to disrupt the early film industry with a motion picture camera for the masses.
(voice)
Deborah Stratman brings past perspectives into the contemporary moment in a montage of unfinished film footage from artist Barbara Hammer with evocative sound, texts, and teachings from artist Maya Deren. Vever poetically draws connects between three generations of women filmmakers who separately, and now together, have taken on unknown challenges, and opened themselves up to reinterpretation in their filmmaking practices.
Director of Photography
Deborah Stratman brings past perspectives into the contemporary moment in a montage of unfinished film footage from artist Barbara Hammer with evocative sound, texts, and teachings from artist Maya Deren. Vever poetically draws connects between three generations of women filmmakers who separately, and now together, have taken on unknown challenges, and opened themselves up to reinterpretation in their filmmaking practices.
We, as human beings on a small globe, united by evolutionary structure and biological DNA have a chance to come together through the experience of empathy and identification with the sensitive body. An unspoken plea for viewers to engage with compassion, to experience vulnerability, to know through evidence this body is their body.
Director
We, as human beings on a small globe, united by evolutionary structure and biological DNA have a chance to come together through the experience of empathy and identification with the sensitive body. An unspoken plea for viewers to engage with compassion, to experience vulnerability, to know through evidence this body is their body.
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives.
Director
Barbara Hammer's first and only multi-channel video installation, that tackles deeply personal subjects of her life.
Director
Lesbian Whale animates early notebooks drawings made by Barbara Hammer between 1969 and 1971, with a voiceover commentary by friends and peers. The drawings and paintings seen in the film were made at a crucial turning point in Hammer’s early career, both before and after she left her husband to pursue a career in art and film.
Director
Welcome To This House, a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop, is about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full lesbian disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop's best loved homes in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil, believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends,and scholars provide missing documents of numerous female lovers. Bishop's intimate poems and the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara bring the poet into our lives with new facts and unexpected details.
Self
Masculinity/Femininity is an experimental film project interrogating normative notions of gender, sexuality and performance. Shot primarily on Super 8, the project merges academic and creative critique -- a document of gender de-construction rather than a documentary about gender construction.
Director of Photography
Maya Deren's Sink, a 30 minute experimental film, is an evocative tribute to the mother of avantgarde American film. The film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Teiji Ito's family, Carolee Schneemann and Judith Malvina, float through the homes recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren's architectural and personal interior space. Clips from Maya Deren's films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed appearing on the floorboard, furniture, and in the bowl of her former sink. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know as film with its imaginary nature evokes a former time and space.
Editor
Maya Deren's Sink, a 30 minute experimental film, is an evocative tribute to the mother of avantgarde American film. The film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Teiji Ito's family, Carolee Schneemann and Judith Malvina, float through the homes recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren's architectural and personal interior space. Clips from Maya Deren's films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed appearing on the floorboard, furniture, and in the bowl of her former sink. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know as film with its imaginary nature evokes a former time and space.
Writer
Maya Deren's Sink, a 30 minute experimental film, is an evocative tribute to the mother of avantgarde American film. The film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Teiji Ito's family, Carolee Schneemann and Judith Malvina, float through the homes recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren's architectural and personal interior space. Clips from Maya Deren's films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed appearing on the floorboard, furniture, and in the bowl of her former sink. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know as film with its imaginary nature evokes a former time and space.
Director
Maya Deren's Sink, a 30 minute experimental film, is an evocative tribute to the mother of avantgarde American film. The film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Teiji Ito's family, Carolee Schneemann and Judith Malvina, float through the homes recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren's architectural and personal interior space. Clips from Maya Deren's films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed appearing on the floorboard, furniture, and in the bowl of her former sink. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know as film with its imaginary nature evokes a former time and space.
Self
Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rare, historical film and video footage, this feature documentary reveals how art addressing political consequences of discrimination and violence, the Feminist Art Revolution radically transformed the art and culture of our times.
Generations is a 30 minute 16mm film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Barbara Hammer, 70 years old, hands the camera to Gina Carducci, a young queer filmmaker. Shooting during the last days of Astroland at Coney Island, New York, the filmmakers find that the inevitable fact of aging echoes in the architecture of the amusement park and in the emulsion of the film medium itself. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s Bridges Go Round, both filmmakers edited picture and sound separately, joining their films in the middle when they finished making a true generational and experimental experiment.
Director
Generations is a 30 minute 16mm film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Barbara Hammer, 70 years old, hands the camera to Gina Carducci, a young queer filmmaker. Shooting during the last days of Astroland at Coney Island, New York, the filmmakers find that the inevitable fact of aging echoes in the architecture of the amusement park and in the emulsion of the film medium itself. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s Bridges Go Round, both filmmakers edited picture and sound separately, joining their films in the middle when they finished making a true generational and experimental experiment.
Self
The filmmaker, fighting ovarian cancer, stage 3, returns to her experimental roots, in a multilayered film of numerous chemotherapy sessions with images of light and movement that take her far from the hospital bed. A a cancer ‘thriver’ rather than ’survivor’, Barbara Hammer rides the red hills of Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, the grassy foothlls of the Big Horn in Wyoming, and leafy paths in Woodstock, New York changing illness into recovery. The haunting and wondrous music of Meredith Monk underscores and celebrates in this film that lifts us up when we might be most discouraged.
Writer
The filmmaker, fighting ovarian cancer, stage 3, returns to her experimental roots, in a multilayered film of numerous chemotherapy sessions with images of light and movement that take her far from the hospital bed. A a cancer ‘thriver’ rather than ’survivor’, Barbara Hammer rides the red hills of Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, the grassy foothlls of the Big Horn in Wyoming, and leafy paths in Woodstock, New York changing illness into recovery. The haunting and wondrous music of Meredith Monk underscores and celebrates in this film that lifts us up when we might be most discouraged.
Director
The filmmaker, fighting ovarian cancer, stage 3, returns to her experimental roots, in a multilayered film of numerous chemotherapy sessions with images of light and movement that take her far from the hospital bed. A a cancer ‘thriver’ rather than ’survivor’, Barbara Hammer rides the red hills of Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, the grassy foothlls of the Big Horn in Wyoming, and leafy paths in Woodstock, New York changing illness into recovery. The haunting and wondrous music of Meredith Monk underscores and celebrates in this film that lifts us up when we might be most discouraged.
Director
What do construction workers do in their well-earned breaks? How might Angelina Jolie's and Brad Pitt's relationship have ended? And what really happened between Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford during the summer of 1959? The answers to these and many other interesting questions are provided by twelve queer New York filmmakers. Their films also scrutinize such topics as the difference between the way men and women dream, and how erotic tying a necktie or having a manicure can be.
Director of Photography
Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties and seventies and their daughters do not want to inherit their work, lifestyle, and health problems that go with diving. As a filmmaker I was privileged to meet many of these women and dive with them. Their stories of hardship and pride confirmed my desire to record this unique and ancient tradition.
Producer
Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties and seventies and their daughters do not want to inherit their work, lifestyle, and health problems that go with diving. As a filmmaker I was privileged to meet many of these women and dive with them. Their stories of hardship and pride confirmed my desire to record this unique and ancient tradition.
Director
Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties and seventies and their daughters do not want to inherit their work, lifestyle, and health problems that go with diving. As a filmmaker I was privileged to meet many of these women and dive with them. Their stories of hardship and pride confirmed my desire to record this unique and ancient tradition.
Self
Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties and seventies and their daughters do not want to inherit their work, lifestyle, and health problems that go with diving. As a filmmaker I was privileged to meet many of these women and dive with them. Their stories of hardship and pride confirmed my desire to record this unique and ancient tradition.
Camera Operator
1920’s Surrealist artists Claude Cahun and marcel Moore come to life in this hybrid documentary. Lesbians and step-sisters, the gender-bending artists lived and worked together all their lives. Heroic resisters to the Nazis occupying Jersey Isle during WWII, they were captured and sentenced to death. Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Hammer infuses this film with vigor using photographs, archival footage, dramatic interludes of a “found Cahun script”, and unique interviews of Jersey Isle residents who knew the “sisters”.
Editor
1920’s Surrealist artists Claude Cahun and marcel Moore come to life in this hybrid documentary. Lesbians and step-sisters, the gender-bending artists lived and worked together all their lives. Heroic resisters to the Nazis occupying Jersey Isle during WWII, they were captured and sentenced to death. Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Hammer infuses this film with vigor using photographs, archival footage, dramatic interludes of a “found Cahun script”, and unique interviews of Jersey Isle residents who knew the “sisters”.
Producer
1920’s Surrealist artists Claude Cahun and marcel Moore come to life in this hybrid documentary. Lesbians and step-sisters, the gender-bending artists lived and worked together all their lives. Heroic resisters to the Nazis occupying Jersey Isle during WWII, they were captured and sentenced to death. Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Hammer infuses this film with vigor using photographs, archival footage, dramatic interludes of a “found Cahun script”, and unique interviews of Jersey Isle residents who knew the “sisters”.
Writer
1920’s Surrealist artists Claude Cahun and marcel Moore come to life in this hybrid documentary. Lesbians and step-sisters, the gender-bending artists lived and worked together all their lives. Heroic resisters to the Nazis occupying Jersey Isle during WWII, they were captured and sentenced to death. Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Hammer infuses this film with vigor using photographs, archival footage, dramatic interludes of a “found Cahun script”, and unique interviews of Jersey Isle residents who knew the “sisters”.
Director
1920’s Surrealist artists Claude Cahun and marcel Moore come to life in this hybrid documentary. Lesbians and step-sisters, the gender-bending artists lived and worked together all their lives. Heroic resisters to the Nazis occupying Jersey Isle during WWII, they were captured and sentenced to death. Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Hammer infuses this film with vigor using photographs, archival footage, dramatic interludes of a “found Cahun script”, and unique interviews of Jersey Isle residents who knew the “sisters”.
Director
On October 11, 2001, in Times Square, New York City, an ad hoc group of artists named Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War silently demonstrated for peace at a time when the nation was clamoring for war and sacrificing its own civil liberties.
Director
Hammer’s 2003 film Resisting Paradise, which deals with the concept of art as a tool of political resistance, was especially fascinating to me. Hammer, who was doing a painting residency in Cassis, France, when war broke out in Kosovo, found herself questioning the validity of art in the face of political conflict and unrest. She began exploring the history of the French Resistance in Cassis, and used that as a chance to reflect on how Cassis’ artistic community, both those who were threatened by the Nazi occupation of France and those who were able to remain relatively neutral, reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War.
Director
Hammer’s 2003 film Resisting Paradise, which deals with the concept of art as a tool of political resistance, was especially fascinating to me. Hammer, who was doing a painting residency in Cassis, France, when war broke out in Kosovo, found herself questioning the validity of art in the face of political conflict and unrest. She began exploring the history of the French Resistance in Cassis, and used that as a chance to reflect on how Cassis’ artistic community, both those who were threatened by the Nazi occupation of France and those who were able to remain relatively neutral, reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War.
Camera Operator
This video documentary centers on the questions of civil liberties and cultural differences in a society beginning to open as one woman searches for her own ethnic roots, identity and family history in Ukraine. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homophobia, feminism and a divided and economically-depressed country are encountered as Barbara Hammer, a feminist activist and pioneer of lesbian cinema, return to a “homeland” full of struggling as people search for a new post-glasnost identity.
Editor
This video documentary centers on the questions of civil liberties and cultural differences in a society beginning to open as one woman searches for her own ethnic roots, identity and family history in Ukraine. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homophobia, feminism and a divided and economically-depressed country are encountered as Barbara Hammer, a feminist activist and pioneer of lesbian cinema, return to a “homeland” full of struggling as people search for a new post-glasnost identity.
Producer
This video documentary centers on the questions of civil liberties and cultural differences in a society beginning to open as one woman searches for her own ethnic roots, identity and family history in Ukraine. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homophobia, feminism and a divided and economically-depressed country are encountered as Barbara Hammer, a feminist activist and pioneer of lesbian cinema, return to a “homeland” full of struggling as people search for a new post-glasnost identity.
Director
This video documentary centers on the questions of civil liberties and cultural differences in a society beginning to open as one woman searches for her own ethnic roots, identity and family history in Ukraine. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homophobia, feminism and a divided and economically-depressed country are encountered as Barbara Hammer, a feminist activist and pioneer of lesbian cinema, return to a “homeland” full of struggling as people search for a new post-glasnost identity.
Self
This video documentary centers on the questions of civil liberties and cultural differences in a society beginning to open as one woman searches for her own ethnic roots, identity and family history in Ukraine. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homophobia, feminism and a divided and economically-depressed country are encountered as Barbara Hammer, a feminist activist and pioneer of lesbian cinema, return to a “homeland” full of struggling as people search for a new post-glasnost identity.
Director of Photography
A montage of film clips and stills calling all lesbians to come out and celebrate who they are. In a trilogy of experimental documentaries, director Barbara Hammer rewrites history by inserting lesbians and lesbian imagery throughout educational films, newsreels, medical footage and more from the past century.
Producer
A montage of film clips and stills calling all lesbians to come out and celebrate who they are. In a trilogy of experimental documentaries, director Barbara Hammer rewrites history by inserting lesbians and lesbian imagery throughout educational films, newsreels, medical footage and more from the past century.
Editor
A montage of film clips and stills calling all lesbians to come out and celebrate who they are. In a trilogy of experimental documentaries, director Barbara Hammer rewrites history by inserting lesbians and lesbian imagery throughout educational films, newsreels, medical footage and more from the past century.
Director
A montage of film clips and stills calling all lesbians to come out and celebrate who they are. In a trilogy of experimental documentaries, director Barbara Hammer rewrites history by inserting lesbians and lesbian imagery throughout educational films, newsreels, medical footage and more from the past century.
Editor
Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan. These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.
Producer
Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan. These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.
Director
Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan. These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.
Self
Documentary that highlights 18 women and covers a period of time from the 50's to the 90's. The women chosen were selected because they represent the real diversity within both feminism and independent film and video. They range in age from 65 to 25. They are black, white, Puerto Rican, Yugoslavian, Asian American, biracial. They are straight, gay and bisexual. What they share is a need to express their own interpretations of what American culture is and could be and a belief that this work is made particularly powerful through the media.
Sound
The Female Closet uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian stories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies, and archival photographs, and other visual sources, The Female Closet is a cultural interrogation of the closeted and not-so-closeted lives of three women artists.
Director of Photography
The Female Closet uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian stories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies, and archival photographs, and other visual sources, The Female Closet is a cultural interrogation of the closeted and not-so-closeted lives of three women artists.
Producer
The Female Closet uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian stories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies, and archival photographs, and other visual sources, The Female Closet is a cultural interrogation of the closeted and not-so-closeted lives of three women artists.
Editor
The Female Closet uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian stories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies, and archival photographs, and other visual sources, The Female Closet is a cultural interrogation of the closeted and not-so-closeted lives of three women artists.
Director
The Female Closet uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian stories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies, and archival photographs, and other visual sources, The Female Closet is a cultural interrogation of the closeted and not-so-closeted lives of three women artists.
Director
“Blue Film No. 6: Love Is Where You Find It” (1998) is a found porn flick: a threesome. Hammer excises the male part, retaining the two ladies and an amusing digest of voyeuristic platitudes.
Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on International Women's Day, and tap dances on Shirley Temple's star on Hollywood Boulevard. This child movie star was the ideal by which Hammer's ambitious mother measured her own Barbie. Grandma, already a cook for Lillian Gish in Hollywood, introduced the cute, loquacious child and her mother to D.W. Griffith. Lesbian autobiography is a slender genre, so Hammer draws from general culture studies for critique and to provide an ironic edge to the synthesized "voices of authority".
Director
Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on International Women's Day, and tap dances on Shirley Temple's star on Hollywood Boulevard. This child movie star was the ideal by which Hammer's ambitious mother measured her own Barbie. Grandma, already a cook for Lillian Gish in Hollywood, introduced the cute, loquacious child and her mother to D.W. Griffith. Lesbian autobiography is a slender genre, so Hammer draws from general culture studies for critique and to provide an ironic edge to the synthesized "voices of authority".
Director
Out in South Africa, a documentary about a country in the state of transition; specifically of lesbians and gays, black and white, Indian and Asian, from townships, cities and rural areas who speak of their lives and desires as homosexuals in post-apartheid South Africa. Hammer was invited to have a retrospective in summer, 1994, at the first Gay and Lesbian film festival on the African continent. She wanted to do more than screen her films and videos; she wanted to teach video production skills in the townships. These workshops provide the deeply moving stories lesbians and gays told to one another.
Director
A minute-long, partly animated colour video that is a humorous plea for good sex, safely prophylactic though it may be.
Writer
Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.
Producer
Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.
Interviewer / Narrator (voice)
Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.
Editor
Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.
Director of Photography
Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.
Director
Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.
Director
In “Vital Signs” (1991), Barbara Hammer demonstratively transforms the horror of death into its opposite. She tenderly cares for a human skeleton, feeding it, dressing and caressing it, taking it for walks in the dark cabaret of an intimate relationship beyond death. She confronts pain and fear rather than repressing them.
Director
Excavation of Dr. James Sibley Watson
Director
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.
Director
‘Still Point’ serves as Barbara Hammer’s definitive reassessment of 70’s cultural feminism. She literally places side-by-side the romantic image of her companion walking and stretching under the sun in a landscape and the gritty realism of a methodical garbage picker on the street of New York city, pushing a shopping cart and moving on to the next waste container. Our world view must encompass both realities, the film indicates. Privilege can’t obscure vision.
Director
From the platonic cave to post-punk, the tape traces the invisible and visible references to women who love women from prehistory to contemporary times with the sarcastic sound of the ’50s lesbian quartet from Seattle, the Sluts from Hell.
Director
Place Mattes explores the space between reaching and touching. Animation and optical printing are used to create travelling mattes for places, confounding the difference between eternal and internal.
Director
A tape by Barbara Hammer.
Director
A whirlwind tour of paternal institutions: fatherhood, Lacanian psychoanalysis and bondage.
Director
Three short films. I: The Wet Dream-Questions of seduction, viewer/viewed and personal stories are collaged in this heavily postproduced account of a 'hot tub relationship. II: The Erotic Intellect-Shot in Garbo's Hairdressing Salon, Hammer suggests intellectual stimulation to be as provocative as overt sexuality. III: Clip, Grab, and Paint-A sunstroke delirium as the videographer identifies with Georgia O'Keeffe and her radio obituary using a frame buffer and computer program for paintbrush and easel.
Director
The Peruvian Galapagos Islands feature in Hammer’s film Endangered, where Blue-footed Boobies, seals and iguanas are equated with the filmmaker herself who identifies light, life and the genre of experimental film to be threatened with extinction in this late twentieth century. Every image is marked and cancelled before it disappears. Even the emulsion of the film is treated with acid showing its fragility. The film is a highly effective compilation of image, colour and sound building upon each other, slowly heightening the sense of urgency. Against this mood there is a reassuring image of a silhouetted woman working at the film projector. A strong, competent, fearless woman. Woman documenting, warning, saving.
Editor
NO NO NOOKY TV posits sexuality to be a social construct in a "sex-text" of satiric graphic representation of "dirty pictures." Made on an Amiga Computer and shot in 16mm film, NO NO NOOKY TV confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age.
Director of Photography
NO NO NOOKY TV posits sexuality to be a social construct in a "sex-text" of satiric graphic representation of "dirty pictures." Made on an Amiga Computer and shot in 16mm film, NO NO NOOKY TV confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age.
Director
NO NO NOOKY TV posits sexuality to be a social construct in a "sex-text" of satiric graphic representation of "dirty pictures." Made on an Amiga Computer and shot in 16mm film, NO NO NOOKY TV confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age.
Director
Deconstructs the representation of AIDS in the popular media where distortion and misrepresentation amount to a "snow job" promoting increased homophobia, sexual discrimination and repression of gays.
Director
In Tourist, Barbara Hammer depicts a trip to Europe: the flow of images is manipulated with a syncopated rhythm, to alter the perception of places that appear well-known and to instill a feeling of anxiety ...
Director
An investigation into what subway passengers are reading.
Director
"Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve is a powerful personal reflection on family and aging. Hammer employs filmed footage which, through optical printing and editing, is layered and manipulated to create a compelling meditation on her visit to her grandmother in a nursing home. The sense of sight becomes a constantly evolving process of reseeing images retrieved from the past and fused into the eternal present of the projected image. Hammer has lent a new voice to the long tradition of personal meditation in the avant-garde of the American independent cinema." -- John Hanhardt, Biennial Exhibition Catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1987
Director
"Rapid montage shows a plethora of objects all arranged in, or with reference to, the central prop of a dollhouse. We see whimsical references to domesticity (kitchen implements), clothing (shoes), the housing situation (want ads), feminist film (Annette Kuhn's book Women's Pictures), relationships, claustrophobia. The final shots show the dollhouse outside, up in the branches of a tree - by the effort of cinema, the dollhouse has become a tree-house. This thematic movement mirrors the movement of Barbara Hammer's films in the last few years: from preoccupation with inside/the body, to a claiming of outside/the landscape." —Claudia Gorbman, Jump Cut.
Director
A film investigating the nature of spectator perception in an unfamiliar environment. Manipulating the movement of the film direction on the screen much like a camera shutter, Hammer questions the perceptual experience of mass tourism as the Bâteau Mouche endlessly circles the île de la Cité.
Director
One-point perspective visual path across the US beginning inside a linear accelerator or atom-smashing device and traveling to such high-energy locations as the home of an ancient sun calendar in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; the site of Ohio Valley Mound cultures; the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges; and beyond. Scientists have noted that light rays curve at the outer edges of the universe, leading them to theorize that time also bends. Inspired by this idea, Hammer used an extreme wide angle lens and "one frame of film per foot of physical space" to simulate the concept of bent time.
Director
In Stone Circles, Hammer really leaves ‘nation’ as well as ‘era’ and creates a film poem on the prehistoric stone cultures of Britain.
Director
Optical sound!
Self
Barbara Hammer’s Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking. Today, Audience serves as an invaluable historical archive, providing quick but complex portraits of lesbian scenes in different cities and countries: the San Francisco women are bold and raucous, treating Hammer like a celebrity; the London crowd more reserved and tentative; the Canadians politely critical after initial hesitation. It also functions as a testament to the power of Hammer herself as a figure of lesbian culture, showing how fully she engages audiences to incite new forms of discourse about representation.
Director
Barbara Hammer’s Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking. Today, Audience serves as an invaluable historical archive, providing quick but complex portraits of lesbian scenes in different cities and countries: the San Francisco women are bold and raucous, treating Hammer like a celebrity; the London crowd more reserved and tentative; the Canadians politely critical after initial hesitation. It also functions as a testament to the power of Hammer herself as a figure of lesbian culture, showing how fully she engages audiences to incite new forms of discourse about representation.
Director
An experimental movie where the viewpoint starts in a placid pond high inland, and follows the flow of water down to the sea. The movie experiments with viewing both the air, the water, and the surface of the water at the same time. The tempo changes from calm to frenzied later in the movie as the water is more disturbed.
Director
A lesbian/feminist aesthetic proposing the connection between touch and sight to be the basis for a new cinema. The film explores the tactile child nature within the adult woman filmmaker, the connection between sexuality and filmmaking, and the scientific analysis of the sense of touch.
Director
Made with Barbara Klutinis. Shot with an underwater camera exploring the swimming pools of the Hearst Castle, California.
Director
“Both NEW YORK LOFT and DOLL HOUSE convey a strong sense of resourcefulness, this ‘making something’ out of interiors, specifically domestic spaces. And domestic they are, in an avant-garde sort of way. The filmmaker gives plentiful evidence of arranging things, moving them, adjusting, placing and re-placing. First are poles and sticks found; second is fabric, sheets, pillows; in a third section we see round things. Circular magnets, machine parts, film cans and the like eventually become visually paralleled with the camera lens itself. The lens is seen as Barbara films into a round mirror. How different are the visions of this woman-with-a-movie-camera from Vertov of sixty years ago! Each extols the camera-eye, but Hammer replaces Vertov’s sociopolitical kino-truths with adventures in domestic space.” – Claudia Gorbman, Jump Cut
Director
Animation of photos and paper cut outs from a hike at Machu Pichu in Peru.
Self
Film by Barbara Hammer.
Director
Film by Barbara Hammer.
Director
Using the sixth century B.C. lyricist's poetry, a group of women unwrap the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life. Made by Barbara and six students, together at the Women's Building in Los Angeles.
Director
"A 70-year-old lesbian feminist, seeing little change in the society after years of work, sends out her 40-year-old self on a journey taking her around the perimeters of the San Francisco Bay. During her quest she encounters aspects of her personality: the guardian angel who has all that she needs; the seductress who leads her astray; the wise woman of secrets who she meets underground. The film culminates in a visual crescendo ascending a tower as the heroine's hair is painted white by her counterparts. A dream vision film." —Barbara Hammer
Director
A personal ritual of strength is getting a haircut
Four stages of a lesbian relationship explored in an experimental film starring performance artists Terry Sendgraff and Barbara Hammer on suspended trapezes and ropes.
Director
Four stages of a lesbian relationship explored in an experimental film starring performance artists Terry Sendgraff and Barbara Hammer on suspended trapezes and ropes.
Director
A child, two youths, a mother and three crones spin spirals, joining rituals of birth, death and rebirth. Filmed in Mendocino, California, where the water snake appeared on each shooting day, where the river flooded the sand spiral, where earth, air, fire and water met.
Writer
A hand plays with a vagina as the same scene drifts over a sea of erotic rock formations.
Director
A hand plays with a vagina as the same scene drifts over a sea of erotic rock formations.
Director
Filmmaker Barbara Hammer recounts how she got her scars as well as her "pleasure wrinkles."
Filmmaker Barbara Hammer recounts how she got her scars as well as her "pleasure wrinkles."
Director
In California a young woman artist/filmmaker is led by an older female artist through the small pine forests of Mendocino and the hot desert sands of Death Valley before she is taught the lesson of creative inspiration.
From the first kiss to breakup, Almy and Hammer record their relationship on a reel-to-reel ¾” tape recorder and microphone. Winner of the Louise Riskin Prize at the 1976 San Francisco Art Festival.
Director
A series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker's friends and lovers intercut with a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature.
Director
From the first kiss to breakup, Almy and Hammer record their relationship on a reel-to-reel ¾” tape recorder and microphone. Winner of the Louise Riskin Prize at the 1976 San Francisco Art Festival.
Director
"The sub-personalities of me, as baby, athlete, witch and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and color layers coming together through the powers of film." —Barbara Hammer
Director
"I picked up Stan and Jane Brakhage at the airport and drove them to San Francisco State College where Stan spoke about his films to the student body. I was fascinated with Jane. She was so interested in the world around her while Stan seemed caught up only in his ideas. She picked seed pods from trees and plants and told me she had written a lexicon of dog language. She was so much more complex than Stan's portrayal of her in Window Water Baby Moving (1958) that I decided to make a documentary about her for my graduate project." — Barbara Hammer 16mm film, Color/Sound
Director
A comedy about a troop of shield-bearing Amazons who take over city institutions before relaxing in the country. "Superdyke" takes women into the streets when Barbara arms of a platoon of vagina warriors with Amazon shields in an attempt to overthrow San Francisco. They march through City Hall, usurp the bus lines, demythologiz the consumer mentality at Macy's (to the recorded astonishment of casual shoppers), and wander through the erotic art museum. Barbara's frenetic handheld lens catches the startled reactions and the glee of the participants. SUPERDYKE has a home-movie quality to it, but its committed and loose moments in the playground confirm its comic rationale.
Director
An autumnal celebration of colorful fall leaves, brooks and bathing, chanting circles and tree goddess rites. Shot on witch's land in Northern California, it is a woman celebrating woman and nature film with the poetry of Elsa Gidlow accompanying.
Director
A celebration and collage of lesbians, including footage of the Women's International Day march in SF and joyous dancing from the last night of the second Lesbian Conference where Family of Woman played; as well as images of women doing all types of traditional "men's" work.
Writer
Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic. (from bfi.org.uk)
Woman Making Love
Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic. (from bfi.org.uk)
Director
Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic. (from bfi.org.uk)
Director
A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation where women act out their own dramas on a California hillside, in a supermarket, in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. MENSES combines both the imagery and the politics of menstruation in a fine blend of comedy and drama.
Director
A profound and powerful experimental, personal film of one woman's despair, rage and exhibitionism; a baroque fugue of identity chanting growing from women's pain to a holistic, self-healing naming ritual.
A profound and powerful experimental, personal film of one woman's despair, rage and exhibitionism; a baroque fugue of identity chanting growing from women's pain to a holistic, self-healing naming ritual.
Director
An experimental film with lesbian themes
Director
Shot on Super 8mm in color and silent.
Director
One of the first 3 16 mm films made by Barbara Hammer. The filmmaker changes from a damsel in gown and crown to a leather jacket motorcycle dyke.
Director
color, silent, 8mm film
Director
1970, 25:27 min, color, silent, 8mm film on video.
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B&W and color; silent.
Director
Early Barbara Hammer film shot on Super 8mm in color and silent.
Director
Regarding this film and Cleansed: "These are two of the first films Hammer ever made and two of the last films she made while married to a man. Never before screened, they capture Hammer and her former husband interacting together but separately – walking in the woods, riding horses, taking showers. Throughout both of these pieces Hammer uses her own body to manipulate the way in which we see the images, deploying her hands as mattes and creating layers with the shadows of her body." - Leslie Lohman Museum
Director
Aldebaran is the brightest star in the Taurus constellation.
Director
1969, transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 7:34 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP
Director
Early Super 8 short by Barbara Hammer.
Director
1968/69, transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 5:19 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP
Director
Transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 4:08 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP
Director
transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 3:42 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP
Director
Barbara Hammer's first film.
Director
Barbara Hammer (then married and known as Barbara Ward) stakes a claim to immortality.
Writer
It shows a family where the son makes a wish to switch sizes with the father so that he can be the boss for a change. The father doesn't like this at all. After a while, the son slowly realizes that being a grownup isn't all that easy. Unfortunately, the father doesn't seem to realize that the same holds true for being a kid.
Director
"Available Space is a film made for performance on a 360 degree rotary projection table. A woman breaks through confining architectural space, the limited space of a film frame, and the boundaries of a movie screen. Unexpected angles, corners, slants, floor and ceiling are engaged in unexpected play and projection. The film can also be shown as a single channel without live performance." — Barbara Hammer
