Barbara Hammer

it's very funny film actually um dance elite's film it's also world premiering and it's a sort of an yeah a sequel yeah of sorts it is actually very much a sequel to uh this black the unspeakable act um uh comedy of discomfort let's say yeah um

then revivals amazing lineup as well but there's um two shorts programs that i saw they got to see these films this summer and they are some of the most stunning films i've seen the palestinian extraordinary program and so that's across two um things but i uh two uh programs but there's a collection of i think it's eight or ten works and um i was blown away by these just the the editing and cinematography is is out of this world um so i'd highly recommend those um And yeah, if there's anything else, I know Night Drake Kisses, you know, Barbara Forever just was released a documentary from Sundance about Barbara Hammer's life and legacy.

But then this is a world premiere of a new restoration of her, you know, most landmark work.

Yeah, there's tons in revivals.

the that's

difficult sometimes I feel that like I mean the the crowd and the film event can sometimes be bigger than the film itself and it felt like huge this year like absolutely huge like there was a huge I didn't actually see that film we saw the Barbara Hammer film oh yeah that was excellent oh did you yeah yeah the doco one yeah the doco yeah

and then I went and saw Nitrate Kisses which I saw back in the day which is one of her really famous I think it was her

first feature yeah and it's fucking great really amazing yeah

And it's opening in New York this weekend.

It's a beautiful tone poem sort of documentary about the lesbian... experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer who came out after being married to a straight man for some years she really came out like in full force she just like blew that closet door down in the early 1970's in the Bay Area and started making movies about lesbian bodies and lesbian desire that were anti-narrative and maybe more installation-based, the kind of things you would see in a museum, not playing theatrical runs.

In fact, a lot of them were languishing in an archive that Barbara Hammer's longtime partner has been, had kept in their home.

And now this filmmaker, Bridie O'Connor, is helping bring one of those restorations of a film called Nitrate Kisses to the New York Film Festival this year.

But this is not an ordinary bio documentary.

Our second new film in theaters this week is Barbara Forever.

Directed by Bertie O'Connor, this documentary looks at the life, work, and legacy of Barbara Hammer, the pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker whose body of work helped expand what queer cinema could be.

Hammer was not waiting for permission from the mainstream.

She made intimate, political, playful, formally adventurous films that put lesbian experience on screen with a kind of freedom that still feels radical.

I'm Alison Stewart.

Barbara Hammer made films.

She was an artist.

She died in 2019 of ovarian cancer, but she said she was born when she came out as a lesbian in 1970.

It was my undergraduate thesis, and then Flory and I met after Barbara passed in 2019.

So I feel like I got to know Barbara through my research, but also through Flory.

How did you first become aware of Barbara Hammer's work? I was seeking out lesbian films made by lesbian filmmakers.

Even within the canon of queer cinema, I hadn't known about Barbara Hammer, and I was so excited when I found that she was so prolific.

It is crucial to me now.

Thank you, Barbara Hammer, for you, for our time, for the intersections.

Terry

My hunch is that she had figured out that she couldn't afford to go back for the second semester.

If you can talk to someone and have a decent conversation that goes on and on, this is worth pursuing.

Um, And I had been told that Barbara had a big reputation of love them and leave them.

And people would say to me, oh, don't go out with Barbara Hammer.

She'll dump you in a couple months.

Jill Johnston suggests I write my experiences upon coming back to the U.S. and finding myself during nine months in the women's movement.

We talk about need to work apart from the group as individual artists.

I feel it more and more these days of collective politics I am estranged from.

Generally though, politics bore me.

Yeah.

And then Gail would pretty much just, she taught me how to use a chainsaw, drive a standard.

And then would kick me out the door to go work here every day.

My first few years on Hornby were involved with the lesbian community.

wasn't just a sperm donor, and it turned into it.

New Friend is made by Bitsy Knox, with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Barbara Hammer Estate, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, as well as 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio and Kashmir Radio, Berlin.

This chapter of New Friend contains a clip from an interview conducted by Joanne Humphrey with Albert Savoy in 1972.

Thank you to all those who contributed their voices to this chapter of New Friend.

Once an image is given form beyond the pinhole view it reveals, is it more whole? If a photograph's context is explained, fleshed out beyond its rectangular peripheries, does it become more powerful? Or does its poignancy and romance fade with minor detail, thousands of little lights cast into the distance, distracting from its acuity? Sure, photographs tell stories.

But what do those stories tell us? And how do they warble and warp the more they are told? I don't remember when I first learned about Barbara Hammer, the experimental filmmaker and pioneer of lesbian cinema.

Was it in a feminist art history class at art school? Or maybe it was when I saw a still from her 1977 film, Multiple Orgasm, gracing the cover of the art magazine I was working for at the time.

That was in 2018, arguably the culmination of a watershed year in her artistic career the year prior.

It was also almost exactly a year before Barbara Hammer succumbed to a 13-year battle with ovarian cancer.

After years of working in dedication to experimental film, the international art world was beginning to pay attention to Barbara's work, not just as a filmmaker, but as an artist.

In 2017, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art hosted her retrospective, Evidentiary Bodies.

In the years prior, She had begun to work with commercial galleries, KOW in Berlin, and soon after, Company in New York City.