Barbara Hammer

Around 1970, at age 30, Barbara Hammer came out as both a lesbian and a filmmaker. Over the next 50 years she crafted a generous and defiant body of work of around 100 experimental films that celebrate her life as a lesbian, interrogate death and aging, and advocate for human rights.

Her early films from the 1970s are often cited as the first films made by a lesbian about lesbian life. Filmed on 16mm and 8mm film at the height of the women’s liberation movement in California, they captured Hammer discovering her body to be the key to the new universe blooming around her. Hammer filmed herself, her lovers, and friends, often nude, the images collapsing the cinematic gap between seeing and touching, saying, “I believe that the basis for a lesbian aesthetic is the perceptual connection between sight and touch.” Without a cinematic body of work by and about gay women to draw from, Hammer penned several theoretical texts articulating the frameworks of her own feminist cinema.

Her films from this time are marked by abstraction, double and triple exposures, and handheld camera work.“I didn’t have time to be polite or too structured because the energy to make film after film poured through me without respite, and I followed it,” Hammer said.

Aging is a vital thread throughout Hammer’s body of work, one that can be traced back to her 1975 film Moon Goddess. Filmed in the deserts of Death Valley, California, with the older artist Gloria Churchman (or Churchwoman, as she is credited in the film), it shows Hammer being led blindfolded through a forest and desert in a symbolic show of guidance and trust. “Our shadows merging at the end of the film conveys a sense of finding the mother within one’s self, a step beyond the external mother search, and an opportunity then for real lesbian independence,” Hammer said. To break beyond the confines of the default rectangular cinema screen, she projected Moon Goddess on an eight-foot weather balloon, allowing visitors to walk around and lie under it.

Though Hammer created dozens of films during this period, several of which have become foundational works of queer cinema, at the time they received little recognition  from museums or other cultural institutions. Suspecting the art and film worlds did not consider her playful, body-forward films “fine art,” and wanting to be taken seriously, she decided to move her body behind the camera and focus on “the rhythm of the filmmaker.” In 1983’s Bent Time, filmed with a wide lens distorting the edges of the frames, Hammer captured “high energy” locations like a 1,000-year-old celestial clock in New Mexico and the Brooklyn Bridge. The making of the film, a journey across the United States, coincided with the year Hammer left the West Coast for New York City, where she would spend the rest of her life.

Optic Nerve (1985) proved to be a breakthrough, and one of her most technical and visually complex experiments. “I tried to introduce emotional feeling to structural film,” Hammer explained, referring to the repeated, densely layered images of pushing her grandmother’s wheelchair into a nursing home for the first time. Her exploration of death and the body continued in Sanctus (1990), which she created by rephotographing X-rays from the 1950s, revealing the alien, delicate interior of the body she had spent two decades studying from the outside. Sixteen years later, when Hammer was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she made A Horse is not a Metaphor on a small, handheld consumer video camera during her chemotherapy treatments and subsequent healing time on horseback. “I walk undisguised, a bald ghost of myself, but I WALK. Oh, joy is life,” reads the text on the screen over an image of Hammer nude in a Catskills creek with a horse superimposed on top of her, declaring her vivaciousness.

In the last years of her life, Hammer became an outspoken advocate for the right-to-die movement. She shared herself and her art with the public until the very end. In a landmark performative lecture she gave at the Whitney Museum, The Art of Dying (or Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety), she said, “Cancer is not a battle, it is not a war, and I am not fighting. I am living with cancer, and have been living with cancer and am grateful to have done it while living fully.” Central to her talk was a rallying cry for artists to organize and care for their archives. In an interview a few weeks before her passing, Hammer said, “The wonderful thing about dying is the interesting processes…. I try to take notes on it. It is harder to write now. I don’t really feel like going into so many details when pain hits hard, though I kind of feel like I should. I mean, what am I? An investigator, an archeologist.”

Note: Opening quote is from Another Gaze. “‘Deconstruct, Reconstruct, Challenge, Celebrate’: In Conversation With Barbara Hammer.” Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal (blog), March 17, 2019. https://www.anothergaze.com/deconstruct-reconstruct-challenge-celebrate-conversation-barbara-hammer-interview/.

Brittany Shaw, independent scholar, 2024