Barbara Hammer
- 1974Dyketactics
- 1992Nitrate Kisses
- 1995Tender Fictions
Fed intoNew Queer Cinema
She put lesbian lives and bodies on screen when almost no one else would, and kept reinventing how to do it.
Hammer came out at thirty, bought a Super 8 camera and rode off on a motorcycle. Her short Dyketactics, made in 1974, is often described as one of the first films about lesbian sexuality made by a lesbian.
Over more than eighty films she moved from tactile, joyful shorts to essay films that dug through erased histories. Nitrate Kisses intercuts archival fragments with elderly and interracial couples. It's a film about who gets left out of the record.
She kept working into her final illness, and her last public performance argued for the right to die with dignity. She died in 2019.
Films
Where to start with Barbara Hammer, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Dyketactics
One hundred and ten images of touch, bathing and lovemaking in four minutes. Hammer wanted it felt as much as seen.
Nitrate Kisses
Hammer's first feature sets fragments of half-erased queer history, including footage from the 1933 film Lot in Sodom, against present-day couples.
Still from Tender Fictions to come. Tender Fictions
A playful autobiography that doubts a life can be told at all, then tries anyway with home movies, found footage and performance.
Echoed in
Where Hammer's ideas turned up next.
