Nitrate Kisses was Barbara’s first feature length film, and it remains extremely influential not only to contemporary filmmakers, but to the LGBT community-it was the first time anyone had ever seen two women in their 60s or 70s making love on film. Menses was an attempt to poke fun at and poke holes in these inaccuracies. Even today-but especially then-the subject of menstruation is so taboo that rumors, myths and fantasies surround it. Menses was an important film from this period and included one of the subjects that had not been dealt with in cinema or art: menstruation. The film featured a humorous play that centered around the “secrets” of menstruation that Barbara was brought up with in the fifties. In the seventies, Barbara’s work centered on what she called the “ aesthetics of lesbian cinema,” which tended to be body focused. She was clearly sensitive to and interested in the new subject matter she was exploring: the 1978 film documents four stages of a lesbian relationship. Double Strength (1978)īefore she had ever touched a video camera, Barbara was a housewife, she explained in an interview with Jeu de Paume. After reading about the lives of famous artists, she came out as a lesbian and picked up a Super 8 camera and went on a motorcycle road trip through Africa. This sudden shift in career and sexuality probably made Barbara a perfect candidate to explore this new terrain, as she did in one of her first short films Double Strength. In the above excerpt, you can see visual reference to Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Étant Donné. Instead, I just burst out and let my energy carry me through my work… At the end of Dyketactics!, I showed a vagina on the screen and this man screamed, ‘AAAAAAAHHHH!’ All the women said, ‘Haven’t you seen that before?'” I would have been so afraid and intimidated. “I didn’t realize that it was the first lesbian film made by a lesbian. “I was lucky when I made Dyketactics!,” Barbara said in a BOMB Magazine interview. Burn‘s “Community Action Center” possible, but at the time no one had seen anything like it.
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Her film Dyketactics! is full of imagery we have come to expect in feminist cinema, and have made works like A.K.
Dyketactics! (1974)īarbara is widely regarded as the first-and for a while, the only-lesbian avant-garde filmmaker. Here are just a few of Barbara Hammer’s pioneering works, with gif excerpts. Creative Capital supported her film “Resisting Paradise” in 2000-our very first award year. She had a huge variety of issues to tackle that had never been dealt with in film, much less politics, literature or any other venue: feminine sexuality, homosexuality, gender roles, as well as coping with aging and death. A pioneering lesbian avant-garde filmmaker, Barbara has been extremely prolific since she picked up a camera for the first time in her early thirties. In celebration of a major exhibition of Barbara Hammer’s work at KOW Berlin, we have put together our own modest gif retrospective looking at some of this Creative Capital Artist’s most influential films.
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