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...
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...
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...
"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...
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.
“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,...
“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.
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...
PEARL DIVER is about the frustration of communication between two women who try to tell each other "I love you" underwater making humorous a very wet situation. Filmed in Super 8 in Baja, California and rephotographed in 16mm to emphasize the quality of light underwater and the dual nature of...
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.
"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...
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;...
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...
