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| Portrait of Barbara Hammer |
Barbara Hammer is an American filmmaker in
the genre of experimental films. In the late 1960s she was drawn to
experimental film while studying film at San Francisco State University. During
that time she came out as a lesbian, an act that helped radicalize her approach
to directing. Subsequently she left her marriage, took off on a motorcycle with
a Super-8 camera, she finally became America’s progenitor of lesbian filmmaking
with her film Dyketactics (1974).
She is widely known for creating groundbreaking
experimental films dealing with women's issues. She uses avant-garde strategies
to explore lesbian and gay sexuality, identity, and history, along with other
heretofore unrepresented voices. Hammer says, “It is a political act to work
and speak as a lesbian artist in the dominant art world and to speak as an
avant-garde artist to a lesbian and gay audience. My presence and voice address
both issues of homophobia [and] the need for an emerging community to explore a
new imagination.”
Barbara Hammer at Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012)
In the 1970s her films dealt with the
representation of taboo subjects through performance, and in the 1980s she
began using an optical printer to make films that explore perception. In the 1990s
she began making documentaries about hidden aspects of queer history. According
to Chuck Kleinhans, Hammer “She [Hammer] has made film and video mediations on
death that are deeply personal, but also films about large issues of war and
social justice.” Moreover, Hammer has made “polemical pieces on AIDS, and also
challenging representations of the female body (Kleinhans, 167).”
Maggie Humm notes in Author/Auteur, “Gynocriticism is a way of assessing works of art
specifically in relation to the interest and desires of women (Humm 95).” As I mentioned
above, Hammer is renowned for creating the earliest and most extensive body of
avant-garde films on lesbian life and sexuality, including Dyketactics (1974), Superdyke
(1975) and Women I Love (1976).
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| From Barbara Hammer's Superdyke (1975) |
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| From Barbara Hammer's Dyketacits, 1974. |
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| Barbara Hammer. Women I Love, 1976. |
In Superdyke,
she shows groups of women traverse a meadow carrying bows, arrows, and shields
emblazoned with “Amazon” or dancing in the street in front of San Francisco’s
city hall. The images are of individual women, striking in their diversity of
size, shape and age, but unified by the commonality of rituals and shared
experience. Also, Dyketacits is the
first lesbian lovemaking film made by a lesbian; it reveals Hammer's aesthetic
connecting sight and touch. The camera is not a distant voyeur or blunt
close-up recorder as in so much pornography, but a living and movie presence
capturing, framing, and re-framing caresses and touching. Women I Love presents a series of portraits which show women in
nature or in intimate settings in an often magical way. Opening a dishwasher
reveals daffodils in bloom, and the flower reappears in a plastic speculum,
being actively kissed by one of the lovers. A lover appears on a motorcycle
trip, another in a forest glen. Lovemaking appears not isolated, but as part of
a continuum of nature and intimacy.
Kleinhans asserts that through her films,
Hammer provides empowering imagery for a group of people (lesbians) who have
been denied filmic representation from their own point of view and free access
to public space. (Kleinhans, 170) Barbara says in an interview with BOMB
magazine, “I was lucky when I made Dyketactics
I didn’t realize that it was the first lesbian film made by a lesbian. I would
have been so afraid and intimidated. Instead, I just burst out and let my
energy carry me through my work. In some ways being alone was great. There was
a blank screen and I was filling it. That was a thrill. At the end of Dyketactics, I showed a vagina on the
screen and this man screamed, AAAAAAAHHHH! All the women said, haven’t you seen
that before?”
According to Kleinhans, for some feminist
critics, the romanticism of Hammer’s work in the 1970s created a disturbing undercurrent.
Some rejected what they viewed as her ideology of a separate mythic goddess
spirituality or Amazon culture. Some found images of naked women in pastoral
nature a flight from reality and her autobiographical depictions of her own
body and those of her lovers a recapitulation of masculine patterns of looking (Kleinhans,
171). As Kleinhans notes, Barbara
Hammer’s evolving accomplishment in film and video art challenges the audience
to new ways of thinking and feeling, new kinds of experience. Kleinhans claims,
“The filmmaker faces the world and challenges it, not simply recording life but
provoking the audience and changing it (Kleinhans, 183).” I believe what makes
Hammer extraordinary is, as an auteur, she has made experimental films that blur
the boundaries of media art, and shed new light on the women's issues.
Bibliography
Humm, Maggie. Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film, Feminism
and film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Print.
Blaetz, Robin. Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007. Print.
Barbara Hammer’s Website: http://barbarahammer.com
Links:
MoMA:
BARBARA HAMMER – BIOGRAPHY:
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