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.
Combining perhaps the only footage from the first Women’s International Day march in San Francisco and rare footage of the second National Lesbian Conference at UCLA, Sisters! is a joyous and vital landmark in feminist, queer, and lesbian filmmaking.
“Shot in the Peruvian convent of Santa Catalina, AREQUIPA analogizes the building blocks of film (frames, color and black and white stocks, negative reversal, superimpositions) to the frames of architecture (doorways, windows, walls, corridors). The confinement of the frame, the convent, changed...
"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...
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.
"Behind my desire to 'activate' the audience is a distaste for sutured, hegemonic cinema. By this, I mean a cinema dominated by both narrative and documentary traditions, cinema that hypnotizes its audience through invisible editing, illusionist sound, and 3D) perspective. With Bamboo Xerox, I...
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 ...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
