Hammer, Barbara 1939-

PERSONAL:

Born May 15, 1939, in Hollywood, CA; divorced; partner of Florrie Burke. Education: University of California, Los Angeles, B.A., 1961; San Francisco State University, M.A., 1963, M.A., 1975.

ADDRESSES:

Home—55 Bethune St. #523H, New York, NY 10014.E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Film director, producer, editor, cinematographer, writer, and educator. Producer of films, including The Female Closet, 1998; Devotion: A Film about Ogawa Productions, 2000; History Lessons,2000; My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities, 2001; Resisting Paradise, 2003; and Lover Other: The Story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,2006. Has taught at the State University of New Yorkat Binghamton, Columbia College, San FranciscoState University, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, University of Iowa, Art Institute of Chicago, New School for Social Research, School for Visual Arts in New York, NY, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. Founder, EchoNYC (Web site).

Exhibition: Retrospective at Turin International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 2006.

AWARDS, HONORS:

First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1985, for Optic Nerve; First Prize, Black Maria Film Festival, and First Prize, Bucks County Film Festival, both 1988, both for Endangered;Women in Film Award, Atlanta Film/Video Festival, 1989, for Still Point; Jurors Award, Black Maria Film Festival, and Best Experimental Film award, both 1991, both for Vital Signs; Polar Bear Award for Lifetime Contribution to Lesbian/Gay Cinema, Berlin International Film Festival, 1993; Grand Jury Prize nomination, Sundance Film Festival, 1993, for Nitrate Kisses, and 1996, for Tender Fictions; Isabel Liddell Art Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Director's Choice award, Charlotte Film Festival, both 1995, both for Tender Fictions; Frameline Award for outstanding achievement in lesbian and gay media arts, San Francisco International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, 2000; fellow, Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, 2001-02; Fulbright Senior Specialist, Bratislava Academy of Art and Design, 2005.

WRITINGS:

SCREENPLAYS; AND DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, CINEMATOGRAPHER AND EDITOR, EXCEPT AS NOTED

Schizy, 1968.

Barbara Ward Will Never Die, 1969.

Traveling: Marie and Me, 1970.

The Song of the Clinking Cup, 1972.

I Was/I Am, 1973.

Sisters!, 1974.

A Gay Day, 1974.

Dyketactics, 1974.

X, 1974.

Women's Rites or Truth Is the Daughter of Time,1974.

Menses, 1974.

Jane Brakhage, 1975.

Superdyke, 1975.

Psychosynthesis, 1975.

Superdyke Meets Madame X, 1975.

Moon Goddess, 1976.

Eggs, 1976.

Multiple Orgasm, 1976.

Women I Love, 1976.

Stress Scars and Pleasure Wrinkles, 1976.

The Great Goddess, 1977.

Double Strength, 1978.

Home, 1978.

Haircut, 1978.

Available Space, 1978.

Sappho, 1978.

Dream Age, 1979.

See What You Hear What You See, 1980.

Our Trip, 1981.

Arequipa, 1981.

The Lesbos Film, 1981.

Machu Picchu, 1981.

Pictures for Barbara, 1981.

(With Barbara Klutinis) Pools, Frameline, 1981.

Sync Touch, 1981.

Pond and Waterfall, 1982.

Audience, 1982.

Bent Time, 1983.

New York Loft, 1983.

Stone Circles, 1983.

Doll House, 1984.

Pearl Diver, 1984.

Bamboo Xerox, 1984.

Optic Nerve, 1985.

Tourist, 1985.

Parisian Blinds, 1985.

Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor?, 1985.

Hot Flash, 1985.

Bedtime Stories, 1986.

Place Mattes, 1987.

No No Nooky TV, 1987.

Endangered, 1988.

The History of the World according to a Lesbian,1988.

(Director, with Paula Levine) Two Bad Daughters,1988.

Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of Aids, 1989.

Still Point, 1989.

T.V. Tart, 1989.

Sanctus, 1990.

Vital Signs, 1991.

Dr. Watson's X-Rays, 1991.

(And producer) Nitrate Kisses, 1993.

(And producer) Out in South Africa, 1994.

Tender Fictions, 1995.

The Female Closet, 1997.

(And producer) My Baboushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities, 2001.

(And cinematographer, editor, and producer) Resisting Paradise, Barbara Hammer Productions, 2003.

Contributor to books, including Women's Culture: The Women's Renaissance of the Seventies, edited by Gayle Kimball, Scarecrow Press (Metuchen, NJ), 1981; andQueer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, edited by Martha Geyer, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, Between the Lines (London, England), 1993. Contributor to periodicals, including Cinemanews, Heresies, Film Reader, Spiral, High Performance, Film Quarterly, Release Print, Sojourner, andPerforming Arts Journal.

SIDELIGHTS:

The impressive body of work created by Barbara Hammer during the last three decades exists at the intersection of developments in contemporary American avant-garde film/video practice, and the proactive lesbian feminist community that emerged in the 1970s. Consistently engaged in exploring alternative means of expression, Hammer has moved from experimental film to performance artto feature-length projects to designing sites in cyberspace. Pursuing a path consciously at odds with commercial cinema and structures endemic to patriarchal society, Hammer has worked to generate audience participation, and to that end has employed a collection of strategies—from post-screening discussions, to projection arrangements that create not just moving but mobile images, to Web site construction that invites visitors to contribute to cyberspace archives. Throughout her career, Hammer's writings, interviews, and screening performances have not only allowed her to provide a context for her creative work, they have also underscored the autobiographical character of her projects, and further, the role her creative work has played in the development of her identity as someone who, as she explained to Holly Willis in the Film Quarterly, has dedicated her life to advancing film and lesbian studies. Advocate contributor Jenni Olson called Hammer "the most prolific lesbian filmmaker in history."

After getting a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1961, and a master's in English literature in 1963, Hammer took stock of her life, caught the culture's wave of discontent and experimentation, and left her husband and the United States in 1968 to set off on a global tour with her lesbian lover. She returned to San Francisco in 1972, enrolled in graduate school—this time in cinema—and over the next few years became one of the central figures of lesbian feminist cinema. Hammer's early trilogy, composed of I Was/I Am, X,and Psychosynthesis, recounts, as Jacqueline Zita explained in Jump Cut, a transition from "anger directed outward [to] a synthesis of selves collaged in the symbol of Jungian archetypes." In making that transition, these and other films by Hammer embrace central features of lesbian feminist art of the 1970s; they are marked by the autobiographical and participatory, as opposed to voyeuristic representations of lesbian sexuality; a focus on the lesbian body as beautiful, as opposed to abhorrent; and an exploration of women's lives and women's bodies as being in touch with nature and spirituality, as opposed to being sites of artifice and deviance.

Hammer's body-centered films of the 1970s include a series of landmark films. Dyketactics, a four-minute film in which each image focuses the audience's attention on the sense of touch, has been recognized as the first representation of lesbian sexuality by a lesbian.Multiple Orgasm, with its celebration of the female genitalia, confirms lesbian feminists' emphasis on sexuality, rather than procreativity, as the core of women's identity. Women I Love, which emerged from Hammer's personal experience, explores and thus gives credence to women's sexuality as well as their domain (cooking, craft work, gardening). Double Strength, which recalls Hammer's relationship with trapeze artist Terry Sendgraff, not only created and valorized images of female power, like parallel strategies in other Hammer films, but its use of sepia tones and muted colors helped to define an alternative aesthetic. Hammer's work during this time, as in later periods, ranged from the humor of such films as Superdyketo the spirituality of films such as Moon Goddess.

As Hammer explained in her essay for Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, a 1979 Film Forum program in Los Angeles was the first time her work was screened "outside the supportive lesbian feminist community." That moment also served as marker for a shift in her creative work. In contrast to the 1970s, throughout the 1980s Hammer's more abstract films emphasize the role of the filmmaker in creating meaning. In this collection of work, films such as Parisian Blinds, Tourist, Optic Nerve, Place Mattes,and Endangered represent some of Hammer's most well-known work.

In 1993 Hammer created her fiftieth film, Nitrate Kisses. Her first feature-length piece, the movie is, as Willis pointed out, a "critique of the marginalization of gays and lesbians from common history," and an account of lesbian and gay culture that "attempts to show the processes of history-making." The film creates complex levels of meaning by intercutting, among other things, quotes from the texts that helped shape her conception of the film; archival footage from Lot in Sodom, perhaps the first gay film made in America; and footage she shot in Super 8 of places that held the dramatic stories of ordinary lesbians—from long-closed, off-limits bars to sites of former concentration camps. After completing Nitrate Kisses, Hammer continued to produce lengthier pieces. In 1994 she documented the first gay and lesbian film festival in Africa in her work, Out of South Africa, and in 1995 she completed an autobiographical work entitled Tender Fictions. The film, which follows a rough chronology of Hammer's personal and professional life, "is built from a vast array of raw materials: scratchy home movies; snapshots; overdubs from academic texts; interviews; skewed television programs; reminiscences by Hammer, family and friends, and a string of ex-girlfriends," noted Gary Morris on the Bright Lights Film Journal. Morris reported that Hammer was inspired to create her autobiography "before someone else does it." Using sometimes shocking and unexpected images, Hammer tells about her childhood, her particular stories of family dysfunction, her later-in-life coming out as a lesbian, and her career in Hollywood. The resulting film that emerges, Morris noted, is a "playful, imaginative, penetrating description of an artist's life."

Hammer has continued to produce and direct films.History Lessons, released in 2000, takes a humorous approach to the history of radical sexual politics, assembling a "pastiche of clips from celluloid's more obscure annals" to comment slyly, even subversively on gay and lesbian issues throughout the twentieth century, noted Dennis Harvey in Variety. Careful manipulations and juxtapositions of found footage produce some surprising effects, including a women's club speech from Eleanor Roosevelt that "seems to be urging sisters to unite in carnality as well as community activism," Harvey observed. Using obscure footage from sex-education films, women's sports events, newsreels, pornographic movies, vintage commercials, and other sources, Hammer creates an amusing, prankish, and high-spirited film that "identifies, invents and/or smirkingly implies gleeful lesbian sexuality in every cultural nook and cranny," Harvey concluded. Library Journal reviewer Lisa N. Johnston called the movie "a creative, irreverent interpretation of lesbian history and life."

My Baboushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities, from 2001, grew out of Hammer's trip to the Ukraine to seek out living relatives of her maternal grandmother, according to Chris Cooke on the New England FilmWeb site. The film "documents her trip as it grows from a search for ancestry to an exploration of a changed society," Cooke reported. Combining elements of Ukraine's Nazi-era history, during which the Ukrainians were willing accomplices of the Nazis, and the curious sexual and cultural atmosphere of the country that seems to mirror the repressions of 1950s America, Hammer looks closely at the anti-Semitism and homophobia that exist in the newly capitalist country. Hammer's "unique viewpoint gives strength to this interesting look at the nation's post Cold-War culture," Cooke observed.

Resisting Paradise, a 2003 release written, directed, edited, and produced by Hammer, focuses on a wartime correspondence between famed painters Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. With this background, Hammer considers the question of the effect of war on the creation of art, and what social responsibility artists have during times of war or enemy occupation. Matisse emerges from the film as apolitical and largely oblivious to the war, except in how it inconvenienced him in his work and daily life. In contrast, Matisse's wife, son, and daughter willingly risked their lives as members of the resistance. Hammer "clearly has scant sympathy for those who abstain from taking a stand under crisis," commented Harvey in another Varietyreview. However, she also does not acknowledge the apolitical nature of much art, Harvey noted, and does not address the fact that many artists of Matisse's stature are often "incapable of seeing past their own obsessive art and ego." Harvey called the film an "intriguing, absorbing hybrid" of "personal and historical inquiry."

Apart from her moviemaking, Hammer has been involved in other projects supporting lesbian and gay issues. She has created a Web site, EchoNYC.com,which she describes as a "Lesbian Community in Cyberspace." The site's interactive character and its role in making the lesbian experience publicly visible emerge from concerns that have informed Hammer's work from the beginning. In very practical terms, the site makes possible projects she has been working towards for some time. As early as 1982 Hammer sought to make an international compilation film consisting of women expressing what for them was erotic. Today, one component of the Web site's continuously developing archive is a collection of diverse expressions of women who have visited the Web site.

Barbara Hammer is not the first American filmmaker to explore women's sexuality—Hammer has acknowledged the influence of American avant-garde filmmakerMaya Deren—nor is she the only filmmaker whose work helps to write the history of lesbian experience. She is, however, a pioneer, a force to be reckoned with, for, as she has explained to Zita, "to live a lesbian life, to make it real, to validate it in film, is a revolutionary act." As Zita suggested, Barbara Hammer is "a woman artist struggling to redefine the medium in a form and content commensurate with the requirements of a new lesbian aesthetic."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Geyer, Martha, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, editors, Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, Between the Lines (London, England), 1993.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, February 7, 1980, Gregory Springer, "Barbara Hammer: The Leading Lesbian behind the Lens"; November 17, 1992, David Ehrenstein, "Kisses for Barbara Hammer"; February 7, 1995, Victoria A. Brownsworth, review of Out in South Africa; June 20, 2000, Jenni Olson, "Hammer's Herstory."

Art Journal, summer, 1991, Christine Tamblyn, "No More Nice Girls: Recent Transgressive Feminist Art"; spring, 1994, Joanna Freuh, "The Erotic As Social Security."

Bright Lights Film Journal, September, 1986, Gary Morris, "Barbara Hammer Continues the Groundbreaking Investigations into Gender that Started with Nitrate Kisses—This Time Using Autobiography to Tell Her Truths."

Film Quarterly, summer, 1994, Holly Willis, interview with Barbara Hammer.

High Performance, spring-summer, 1988, Jan Ventura, "Barbara Hammer: Woman of Vision."

Hot Wire, May, 1991, Ellen Meyers and Toni Armstrong, "A Visionary Woman Creating Visions: Barbara Hammer."

Independent Film and Video Monthly, April, 1994, K.D. Davis, "Life in the Nonlinear Lane."

Jump Cut, March, 1981, Andrea Wess, "Women I Loveand Double Strength: Lesbian Cinema and Romantic Love, and Jacquelyn Zita, "Films of Barbara Hammer: Counter Currencies of a Lesbian Iconography"; April, 1986, Claudia Gorbman, "Recent Work of Barbara Hammer: Bodies Displaced, Places Discovered."

Library Journal, August, 2002, Lisa N. Johnston, review of History Lessons, p. 165.

Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1993, Michael Wilmington, "A Look at Lesbian Sensibility at the Naurt."

Public Art Review, fall-winter, 1995, Collete Gaiter, "Private Broadcasts/Public Conservations."

San Francisco Chronicle, October 29, 1992, Edward Guthmann, "Gay Culture, History Explored inKisses."

Variety, February 1, 1993, Suzan Ayscough, review ofNitrate Kisses; February 26, 1996, Emanuel Levy, review of Tender Fictions; July 10, 2000, Dennis Harvey, review of History Lessons, p. 26; August 9, 2004, Dennis Harvey, review of Resisting Paradise, p. 33.

Village Voice, March 16, 1993, Manohla Dargis, "Tring to Mix It Up."

ONLINE

Barbara Hammer Home Page,http://www.barbarahammerfilms.com (July 14, 2006).

EchoNYC,http://www.echonyc.com (July 14, 2006), site run by Hammer.

New England Film,http://www.newenglandfilm.com/(November, 2001), Chris Cooke, "Searching for Identity," review of My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities.