Barbara Hammer
Barbara Hammer | |
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![]() Hammer at the 2014 Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon | |
Born | Barbara Jean Hammer May 15, 1939 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Died | March 16, 2019 New York City, U.S. | (aged 79)
Occupation | Filmmaker |
Years active | 1968–2019 |
Spouse(s) | Florrie R. Burke |
Website | Official website ![]() |
Barbara Jean Hammer (May 15, 1939 – March 16, 2019) was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers[1] of lesbian film genre, whose career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.[2]
Life and career[]
Hammer was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Inglewood, the daughter of Marian (Kusz) and John Wilber Hammer.[3] She became familiar with the film industry from a young age, as her grandmother worked as a live-in cook for the American film director D.W. Griffith.[4][5] Her maternal grandparents were Ukrainian. Her grandfather was from Zbarazh. Hammer was raised without religion, but her grandmother was Roman Catholic.[6]
In 1961, Hammer graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received a master's degree in English literature in 1963.[7] In the early 1970s she studied film at San Francisco State University. This is where she first encountered Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, which inspired her to make experimental films about her personal life.[8]
In 1974, Hammer was married and teaching at a community college in Santa Rosa, California. 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."[5] That year she filmed Dyketactics, which is widely considered one of the first lesbian films. She graduated with a Masters in film from San Francisco State University.
She released her first feature film, an experimental documentary, Nitrate Kisses in 1992. 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. She earned a Post Masters in Multi-Media 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.[9]
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 the Teddy Award for the best short film for her film 'A Horse Is Not A Metaphor' at the Berlin International Film Festival.[10]
In 2010, Hammer published her autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life,[4] which addresses her personal history and her philosophies on art.[11]
She taught film at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.[12] In 2017, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University acquired Hammer's archives.[13]
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 Hammer's films, including Multiple Orgasm, Sanctus, Menses, and No No Nooky T.V.[14]
She was married to human rights advocate Florrie Burke at the time of her death. They were partners for thirty-one years.[15]
Awards[]
Hammer created more than 80 moving image works throughout her life, and also received a great number of honors.[2]
In 2007, Hammer was honored with an exhibition and tribute in Taipei at the Chinese Cultural University Digital Imaging Center. In New York in 2010, Hammer had a one-month exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, in 2013 she was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for her film Waking Up Together. She also had exhibitions in London at The Tate Modern in 2012, in Paris at the Jeu de Paume also in 2012, in Toronto for the International Film Festival in 2013 and in Berlin at the Koch Oberhuber Woolfe in both 2011 and 2014.[2]
Hammer received numerous awards during the span of her career. She was chosen by the Whitney Biennial in 1985, 1989, and 1993 for her films Optic Nerve, Endangered and Nitrate Kisses respectively. In 2006, she won both the first ever Shirley Clarke Avant-Garde Filmmaker Award from New York Women in Film and Television as well as the Women in Film Award from the St. Louis International Film Festival.[2]
In 2008, Hammer received The Leo Award from the Flaherty Film Seminar. Her films Generations and Maya Deren’s Sink both won the Teddy Award in 2011 for Best Short Films. Her film A Horse Is Not A Metaphor won the Teddy Award for Best Short Film in 2009 it also won Second Prize at the Black Maria Film Festival. It was also selected for several film festivals: the Torino Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Punta de Vista Film Festival, the Festival de Films des Femmes Creteil, and the International Women’s Film Festival Dortmund/Koln.[2]
Style and reception[]
Hammer was an avant-garde filmmaker and focused a large sum of her films on feminist or lesbian topics. Through the use of experimental cinema, Hammer exposed her audiences to feminist theory. Her films, she said, are meant to promote “independence and freedom from social restriction.” [16]
Her films were regarded as being controversial because they focused on feminine taboo topics such as menstruation, the orgasm from the female perspective, and lesbianism. Hammer experimented with different film gauges in the 1980s, especially with 16mm film. She did this in order to show just how fragile film itself is.[2] One of her most well-known films, Nitrate Kisses, “explores three deviant sexualities–S/M lesbianism, mixed-race gay male lovemaking, and the passions and sexual practices of older lesbians.”[17]
Hammer's film Dyketactics (1974) illustrates the importance of the female body to her work, and is shot in two sequences. In the first sequence, the film depicts a group of nude women gathering in the countryside to dance, bathe, touch one another, and interact with the environment. In the second sequence, Hammer herself is filmed sharing an intimate moment with another woman within a Bay Area house. Between the two sequences, Hammer aimed to create an erotic film that used different film language than the mainstream, heterosexual erotic films of the time.[18] She called it a "lesbian commercial".[19]
Hammer's early films utilized natural imagery, such as trees and fruit, to be associated with the female body.[18] Nitrate Kisses (1992) was her longest film to date when it was completed. The film comments on how members of the LGBT community are often left out of history and simultaneously works to remedy the problem by offering some of this lost history to its viewers.[20][21]
This style of filmmaking was met with mixed reactions. In a review of Hammer's films Women I Love (1976) and Double Strength (1978), critic Andrea Weiss noted, "It's become fashionable for women's bodies to be represented by pieces of fruit," and criticized Hammer for "adopting the masculine romanticized view of women.".[22] According to Michael Schell "her relentless pursuit of an artistic vision, informed by the American tradition of experimental cinema, whose integrity was personal, not simply political, can pose a challenge to the assumptions of both sub- and mainstream cultures".[21]
Grant[]
In 2017, the first Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant was awarded, to Fair Brane.[23]
Feminist and lesbian works impact[]
Through her controversial work, Hammer is considered as a pioneer of queer cinema.[2] Her goal through her film work was to provoke discourse on those who are marginalized, and more specifically, lesbians who are marginalized. She felt that making films that show her personal experience renaming herself as lesbian will help start the conversation on lesbianism and get people to stop ignoring its existence.[24]
Illness, right to die activism, and death[]
In 2006, Hammer was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer. After 12 years of chemotherapy, she fought for the right of self-euthanasia. She referenced this in her works, such as her 2009 film A Horse is Not a Metaphor, in which she expressed the ups and downs of a cancer patient. Through her experience, she became an advocate for Right to Die and fought for the New York Medical Aid in Dying Act.[25]
On October 10, 2018, Hammer presented "The Art of Dying," a performative lecture at the Whitney Museum of Art.[26]
Hammer died from endometrioid ovarian cancer on March 16, 2019 at the age of 79. She had been receiving palliative hospice care at the time of her death.[26][27][3]
Filmography[]
- Schizy (1968)
- Barbara Ward Will Never Die (1969)
- Traveling: Marie and Me (1970)
- The Song of the Clinking Cup (1972)
- I Was/I Am (1973)
- Sisters! (1974)
- A Gay Day (1973)
- Dyketactics (1974)
- X (1974)
- Women's Rites, or Truth is the Daughter of Time (1974)
- Menses (1974)
- Jane Brakhage (1975)
- Superdyke (1975)
- Psychosynthesis (1975)
- Superdyke Meets Madame X (1975)
- Moon Goddess (1975) – with G. Churchman
- Eggs (1972)
- Multiple Orgasm (1976)
- Women I Love (1976)
- Stress Scars and Pleasure Wrinkles (1976)
- The Great Goddess (1977)
- Double Strength (1978)
- Home (1978)
- Haircut (1978)
- Available Space (1978)
- Sappho (1978)
- Dream Age (1979)
- Lesbian Humor: Collection of short films (1980–1987)
- Pictures for Barbara (1980)
- Machu Picchu (1980)
- Natura Erotica (1980)
- See What You Hear What You See (1980)
- Our Trip (1981)
- Arequipa (1981)
- Pools (1981) – with B. Klutinis
- Synch-Touch (1981)
- The Lesbos Film (1981)
- Pond and Waterfall (1982)
- Audience (1983)
- Stone Circles (1983)
- New York Loft (1983)
- Bamboo Xerox (1984)
- Pearl Diver (1984)
- Bent Time (1984)
- Doll House (1984)
- Parisian Blinds (1984)
- Tourist (1984–85)
- Optic Nerve (1985)
- Hot Flash (1985)
- Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape (1985)
- Bedtime Stories (1986)
- The History of the World According to a Lesbian (1986)
- Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS (1986)
- No No Nooky T.V. (1987)
- Place Mattes (1987)
- Endangered (1988)
- Two Bad Daughters (1988)[28]
- Still Point (1989)
- T.V. Tart (1989)[28]
- Sanctus (1990)
- Vital Signs (1991)
- Dr. Watson's X-Rays (1991)
- Nitrate Kisses (1992)
- Out in South Africa (1994)
- Tender Fictions (1996)
- The Female Closet (1997)
- Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions (2000)
- History Lessons (2000)[28]
- My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities (2001)
- Resisting Paradise (2003)
- Love/Other (2005)
- Fucking Different New York (2007) (segment "Villa Serbolloni")
- A Horse is not a Metaphor (2009) (Teddy Award)
- Generations (2010)
- Maya Deren's Sink (2011)
- Welcome to this House (2015)
Retrospectives[]
- Museum of Modern Art, New York City (September 15 – October 13, 2010)
- Tate Modern, London (February 3 – 26, 2012)
- Jeu de paume, Paris (June 12 – July 1, 2012)
- Toronto International Film Festival Cinematheque Free Screen (Winter 2013)
- Whitney Museum of Art, New York City (October 10, 2018)
- La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona (9 June 2020 – October 18, 2020)
See also[]
- List of female film and television directors
- List of lesbian filmmakers
- List of LGBT-related films directed by women
References[]
- ^ Youmans, Greg (2012). "Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer's Films of the 1970s" (PDF). Camera Obscura. 27 (3): 100–135. doi:10.1215/02705346-1727473.
- ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g "Barbara Hammer-Biography". barbarahammer.com.
- ^ Jump up to: a b Richard Sandomir (March 20, 2019). "Barbara Hammer, Filmmaker of Lesbian Sexuality Dies at 79". The New York Times. Retrieved March 26, 2019.
- ^ Jump up to: a b Hammer, Barbara (2010). HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY. ISBN 978-1-55861-612-7.
- ^ Jump up to: a b DiFeliciantino, Tina. "Barbara Hammer." Bomb 43 (Spring 1993).
- ^ Jarrett Earnest (December 10, 2012). "Time is an Emotional Muscle". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved March 26, 2019.
- ^ "CV". barbarahammer.com. Archived from the original on March 30, 2019.
- ^ (2010). Butler, Connie (ed.). Modern Women. New York: Museum of Modern Art. p. 309.
- ^ John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowshttp://www.gf.org/fellows/17405-barbara-hammer.
- ^ Barbara Hammer Faculty page at European Graduate School (Accessed June 2, 2010) Archived April 21, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Katterjohn, Anna; Barbara Hammer (February 15, 2010). "Filmic Herstory". Library Journal. 135 (3): 29. ISSN 0363-0277.
- ^ "Barbara Hammer- The European Graduate School". The European Graduate School. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
- ^ Greenberger, Alex (September 14, 2017). "Yale Acquires Barbara Hammer Archives".
- ^ "Preserved Projects". Academy Film Archive.
- ^ Gessen, Masha (February 25, 2019). "Barbara Hammer's Exit Interview". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved November 15, 2019.
- ^ Harper, Glenn (April 1998). Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance. discoverE: SUNY Press. pp. 147–159. ISBN 0-7914-3726-4.
- ^ Juhasz, Alexandra (2001). Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (NED - New ed.). JSTOR: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 77–91. JSTOR 10.5749/j.cttts8r3.
- ^ Jump up to: a b Youmans, Greg (September 2012). "Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer's Films of the 1970s". Camera Obscura. 27 (3): 101–135. doi:10.1215/02705346-1727473.
- ^ Radical light : alternative film & video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000. Anker, Steve, 1949-, Geritz, Kathy, 1957-, Seid, Steve. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2010. p. 195. ISBN 9780520249103. OCLC 606760462.CS1 maint: others (link)
- ^ Willis, Holly; Hammer, Barbara (1994). "Uncommon History: An Interview with Barbara Hammer". Film Quarterly. 47 (4): 7–13. doi:10.2307/1212978. JSTOR 1212978.
- ^ Jump up to: a b Schell, Michael. "Barbara Hammer remembered in Seattle". Schellsburg. Retrieved May 30, 2019.
- ^ Weiss, Andrea (1981). "Women I Love, Double Strength: Lesbian Cinema and Romantic Love". Jump Cut.
- ^ Durón, Maximilíano (December 5, 2017). "Queer-Art Names Inaugural Recipient of Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant".
- ^ Harper, Glenn (1998). Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance. discoverE: SUNY Press. pp. 147–159. ISBN 0-7914-3726-4.
- ^ "Right To Die Advocate: 'Living Has Been Terrific' But Now She Wants Control Over When It Ends". February 6, 2019. Retrieved March 13, 2019.
- ^ Jump up to: a b Whitney Museum of American Art (October 18, 2018), The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety) | Live from the Whitney, retrieved March 13, 2019
- ^ Greenberger, Maximilíano Durón and Alex (March 16, 2019). "Barbara Hammer, Pioneering Queer Experimental Filmmaker, Dead at 79".
- ^ Jump up to: a b c "The repository of the Experimental Television Center". Cornell University Library. hdl:1813.001/8946249. Cite journal requires
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Further reading[]
- Kleinhans, Chuck (2007). "Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History". In Robin Blaetz (ed.). Women's Experimental Cinema. Duke University Press.
- Epstein, Sonia (2016). "Barbara Hammer and the X-rays of James Sibley Watson." Sloan Science & Film.
- Alexandra Juhasz, editor (2001). Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video. University of Minnesota Press.
External links[]
- Official Website
- Barbara Hammer at IMDb
- Barbara Hammer at Women Make Movies website
- Barbara Hammer in the collection of MoMA
- "Barbara Hammer's Exit Interview," Masha Gessen, New Yorker, February 24, 2019.
- Barbara Hammer Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
- 1939 births
- 2019 deaths
- American autobiographers
- American educators
- American experimental filmmakers
- American people of Ukrainian descent
- American women film directors
- American women non-fiction writers
- Lesbian artists
- Lesbian writers
- LGBT directors
- Women autobiographers
- Women experimental filmmakers
- LGBT artists from the United States
- LGBT writers from the United States
- Film directors from California
- LGBT people from California
- Artists from Los Angeles
- Writers from Los Angeles
- San Francisco State University alumni
- University of California, Los Angeles alumni
- European Graduate School faculty
- Lambda Literary Award winners
- Deaths from ovarian cancer
- American women academics