Barbara Hammer
Barbara Jean Hammer was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers of the lesbian film genre, and her career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.
Life
Hammer was born on May 15, 1939, in Los Angeles, California, to Marian and John Wilber Hammer, and grew up in Inglewood. She became familiar with the film industry from a young age, as her mother hoped she would become a child star like Shirley Temple, and her grandmother worked as a live-in cook for American film director D. W. Griffith. Her maternal grandparents were Ukrainian; her grandfather was from Zbarazh. Hammer was raised without religion, but her grandmother was Roman Catholic.In 1961, Hammer graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and married Clayton Henry Ward, on the condition that he take her traveling around the world. She received a master's degree in English literature in 1963. In the early 1970s, she studied film at San Francisco State University, where she first encountered Maya Deren's experimental short film Meshes of the Afternoon, which inspired her to make her own experimental films about her personal life.
In 1974, Hammer was married and teaching at a community college in Santa Rosa. Around this time, she came out as a lesbian, after talking with another student in a feminist group. After leaving her marriage, she "took off on a motorcycle with a Super-8 camera." That year she filmed Dyketactics, widely considered one of the first lesbian films. She graduated with a master's degree in film from San Francisco State University.
In 1992, she released her first feature film, Nitrate Kisses, an experimental documentary about the marginalization of LGBT people in the 20th century. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. It won the Polar Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Best Documentary Award at the Internacional de Cine Realizado por Mujeres in Madrid. Conversely, right-wing organizations labeled the film a "homoerotic film abomination." She earned a post-master's in multimedia digital studies at the American Film Institute in 1997. In 2000, she received the Moving Image award from Creative Capital, and in 2013, she was a Guggenheim Fellow.
She received the first Shirley Clarke Avant-Garde Filmmaker Award in October 2006, the Women In Film Award from the St. Louis International Film Festival in 2006, and in 2009, she received the Teddy Award for best short film for her film A Horse Is Not a Metaphor at the Berlin International Film Festival.
In 2010, Hammer published her autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, which addresses her personal history and her philosophies on art.
She taught film at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. In 2017, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University acquired her archives.
Hammer's film collection, comprising her originals, prints, outtakes, and other material resides at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, where a project is in progress to restore her complete film output. As of 2020, the archive has preserved nearly twenty of her films, including Multiple Orgasm, Sanctus, Menses, and No No Nooky T.V.
After years of short-term relationships, she married human rights advocate Florrie R. Burke; in 1995, she made Tender Fictions, a film featuring images of Burke. They were partners for thirty-one years, until Hammer's death in 2019.
Career
Hammer's career worked within experimental 16 mm film and video, spanning five decades. Hammer was both innovative and productive. Her topics of work were wide-ranging, from the beauty of the body and love to the discussion of politics and society, and her body of work includes almost 100 films. Throughout her career, Hammer kept challenging herself and exploring new and unfamiliar topics. Her career could be divided into three stages according to her developing focus of work: early career stage, mid-career stage, and late-career stage.1960s–1970s: Early career and cultural feminism
Her early films, made during her time at San Francisco State University, focused on female and homosexual topics and embodied the 1970s notion of cultural feminism. During this early stage of Hammer's career, especially in the mid-1970s, her role as the only women filmmaker who openly claimed as a lesbian was widely indicated in her works. Her works during this period were later critiqued as romanticism and essentialism. There are many physical and sexual representations of the female body, emphasizing the idea of expressing love, desire, and erotic pleasure between lesbians openly. Those films aim to illustrate personal and private ideas and beliefs and hope the audience can get physically involved.Hammer was actively involved in media making industry during this period, including learning new skills and techniques, organizing premieres of her own works, opening film workshops and lessons that are related to women filmmaking, etc.
Notable works from this period:
Dyketactics : Dyketactics is one of the most prominent works in the history of lesbian cinema. It was made during Hammer's time at San Francisco State University. As Hammer talked about in a later interview, one of the reasons for making this film was that there were no lesbian films existing during that time. There are many intimate shots in Dyketactics: women take off their clothes and dance with each other, embrace with nature and touch each other, and there is a love-making sequence, which Hammer is personally involved in. The slow and gentle actions of the women onscreen and the use of superimpositions and careful framing make those erotic scenes romantic and sensual, differentiating this film from pornography in both narrative and visual forms. Through Dyketactics, Hammer presented lesbian love-making which had not been shown in earlier films, and set a milestone in lesbian cinema.
Superdyke : Superdyke is made in the early stage of gay liberation. The film includes many illustrations of the female body, including nudity, self-touching, and masturbating. Hammer's choice of cinematography in Superdyke was noticeable; for example, she used close-up to capture female bodies on the beach in order to emphasize the tactile sensation of the bodies and the surrounding; she panned the camera together with female characters' movements in a dancing scene to create the motive sensation. By doing so, Hammer explores the sensual potential of filmmaking.
Double Strength : Double Strength focuses on Hammer's relationship with trapeze artist Terry Sendgraff. Though this is a film about this couple's relationship, Hammer does not appear much in the camera. Most of the shots record the body of Sendgraff while she is on the trapezes. There are many superimpositions of Sendgraff's body and shadow and interactions between Sendgraff's body and daily items. The visual style and technics of Double Strength are consistent with Hammer's other works during this period.
1980s–mid-1990s: Mid-career and deepened focus
Hammer's mid-career films danced between short film and feature-length. This part of her career was staged by her decision to move from California to New York, provoked in part by her desire to remove herself from the social and political environment that had directed her towards the cultural feminism of her early films, which were later so harshly critiqued. Moving from simple representations of bodies which was not recognized as fine art, Hammer's focus shifted to more formal works. She started to explore the relationship between the self and the outside world, including light, life, nature, society, government, etc. With the deepened theme and more elaborate production of her works due to her early efforts, many of her works during this period gained attention from the public.Notable works from this period:
Bent Time : Bent Time is a travel film recording places from California to Mexico. The abundant uses of wide-angle lenses and stop-motions bend light within the frame to simulate the theoretical bending of time. This film is also Hammer's way of exploring her decision to relocate to New York City, where she remained until her death.
Nitrate Kisses : Nitrate Kisses is produced under the shadow of the AIDS crisis and unveils the marginalization that homosexual people in America have been subjected to since World War I. This film reflects on the neglected or even forgotten past of the lesbian community and other minority groups. Hammer's voice-over commentary and various older lesbians' testimonies are accompanied by shots of desolate scenery and depressed city views, creating a strong sense of incompleteness and precariousness.
mid-1990s–2018: Late career and self reflection
Hammer's late career coincides with her rise to public prominence with museum retrospectives and her acquisition of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She focused more on identity politics during this period. The theme of wars, health issues, and liberties came to Hammer's attention. She explored the relationship between art and social issues in her works.Her interest in the body was still an essential part of her works. However, instead of the beauty of bodies, her camera shot more about the body when it is aged, hurt, and moved. This was directly connected to her arduous cancer battle, which began with her diagnosis in 2006.
Notable works from this period:
Tender Fictions : Tender Fictions is an autobiographical film that reflects Hammer's early life experiences and is also a sequel to her well-known documentary film Nitrate Kisses.
History Lessons : History Lessons focuses on the erased lesbian past. With the suppressing history, the historical materials of the lesbian community were hard to find. To solve this problem, Hammer uses many commercial materials, including pornography, pulp fiction, etc. Those footages are juxtaposed with comic intent, making the style of the film relatively light and comedic.
My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities : In My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities, Hammer explores her Ukrainian Identity and focuses on the geography, culture, and history of Ukraine.
A Horse is Not a Metaphor : A Horse is Not a Metaphor is an autobiographical depiction of Hammer's fight with and the remission of her third-stage ovarian cancer.
Evidentiary Bodies : Evidentiary Bodies is Hammer's final piece. It includes a melding of performance, artistic installation, and film, acting as a culmination of her involvement with the right-to-die movement.