Film Forum

Barbara Hammer: Embodied Histories

1988 · U.S. · 85 min

Research, recovery, and truth-telling become inseparable in Barbara Hammer’s radical, personal, and political cinema. Barbara Hammer’s mid- to late-career work approaches filmmaking as a form of research, using her camera to recover hidden histories and challenge dominant narratives. Her documentaries and essay films foreground the experiences of marginalized communities, weaving together personal testimony, archival inquiry, and formal experimentation. She expands the act of looking into a political encounter, charged with startling intimacy and urgency, to create a cinema of solidarity. Total runtime: Approx. 85 min. The History of the World According to a Lesbian Anchored by the musical stylings of the Sluts from Hell, a fictional 1950s lesbian cover band quartet, Hammer’s playful survey traces visible and coded references to women loving women across human history: the fossilized lovers of prehistoric times, Platonic philosophy, early expressions of lesbianism in publishing, the subtextual queerness of the Hays Code era, and the punk mod era. Sisters! Sisters! begins with the narration: “I had a dream of women where men used to be: building, working, growing strong, building their bodies into strength for self-defense.” The film stands as a joyous, essential landmark of feminist and lesbian filmmaking, weaving together what may be the only surviving footage of the first Women’s International Day march in San Francisco with rare footage from the second National Lesbian Conference at UCLA where Audre Lorde and Kate Millett spoke. “It’s about women taking over the world: women driving trucks, changing Volkswagen engines, and leading the police in new revolutions! It also has footage of women topless, dancing, sweating—with babies on their shoulders!” – Barbara Hammer Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS Created during a period when misinformation about AIDS was rampant in the United States, Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS assembles video and audio fragments alongside mid-1980s news headlines deconstructing how mainstream media portrayed AIDS, arguing that its distortions and misrepresentations functioned as a “snow job” that fueled greater homophobia, sexual discrimination, and repression of gay people. “I first heard of AIDS in 1985 when I was teaching at Columbia College in Chicago. I noticed the strange and inflammatory articles in the newspapers and I asked my students to collect hysteric headlines for me. And so I began my work on Snow Job. I examined the public ignorance, stigmatization, and just plain wrong attitudes towards this new illness.” – Barbara Hammer Still Point A four-screen film that whirls around a point of center, Still Point depicts Hammer and her longtime partner Florrie Burke as a middle-class lesbian couple navigating a class-divided society. Juxtaposing tender images of the couple in nature against the harsher realities of the streets of New York, the film grapples with questions of privilege and asks how a same-sex couple occupies public space amid social disparity. “At the still point of the turning world, that's where the dance is,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem of Four Quartets. Witness: Palestine Witness: Palestine was first shown at MoMA PS1 in 2012, projected onto seven volunteers in white shirts and masks. The film documents portraits of Palestinians Hammer met as part of the queer activist delegation during the first LGBTQ Solidarity Tour, sharing personal accounts of life under Israeli occupation and dismantling media stereotypes that demonize Palestinian resistance. One by one, they recount loss and hardship—a man who lost his village at six, a sister whose brother was killed by a rubber bullet, a farmer barred from his land—urgent testimonies of a people enduring ongoing conflict and danger. A Horse Is Not a Metaphor In Hammer’s deeply personal film, she confronts her stage 3 ovarian cancer diagnosis on her own terms, rejecting the battle language often attached to illness, claiming the identity of “thriver,” instead of “survivor.” A Horse Is Not a Metaphor moves between the confined, clinical reality of chemotherapy and open, sensory scenes of Hammer on horseback riding across the red-earth landscape of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, through the grassy foothills of Wyoming’s Big Horn mountains, and along wooded trails near Woodstock, New York. Composer Meredith Monk’s guttural, electronically inflected score threads through these contrasting worlds. Programmed by Andrea Torres Images courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer, New York and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.