Barbara Hammer
’26
Sappho © Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
“Touching another woman’s body changed my life,” said avant-garde pioneer Barbara Hammer (1940 – 2019). “It had to be shown.” When she came out as a lesbian in the early 1970s, she reinvented herself through the Seventh Art. Hammer broke with the visual language of the seventies, placing lesbian desire and female experience at the centre. Not merely as subject matter, but as form: her films pulse, flicker and breathe, as if they were living bodies themselves.
In Dyketactics (1974) and Sappho (1978), the boundaries between documentary, diary and avant-garde film dissolve. Her sensual shorts can be read as love letters to the women she loved or desired. Later, her work became more reflective, exploring time and transience. Until the end, her work remained driven by one conviction: to make visible what remains out of sight.
The screening will be followed by a talk with Nicole Fernández Ferrer, archivist and president of the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Centre. Drawing on her close collaboration with Barbara Hammer and decades of expertise in feminist film and video, Fernández Ferrer offers a unique perspective on Hammer’s radical, intimate and influential body of work.
- In collaboration with Film Fest Gent & yanco, the magazine and streaming library for short-form moving image
- At the entrance, you’ll receive the first entry in yanco’s new print series called “Fold”, a limited-edition A5 publication with a newly commissioned text that contextualizes this event.
Barbara Hammer
Dyketactics
Dyketactics is a celebration of lesbian sensuality and sexuality. A popular lesbian ‘commercial,’ 110 images of sensual touching montages in A, B, C, D rolls of ‘kinaesthetic’ editing. (Barbara Hammer)
Dyketactics © Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Barbara Hammer
Sappho
Using Sappho’s sixth century BC lyricist poetry, a group of women unwraps the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life. Made by Barbara Hammer and six students at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.
Sappho © Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Barbara Hammer
Audience
Barbara Hammer takes her camera out to film audiences at her screenings – some women-only, others mixed. She wants everyone to speak for themselves. She wants to show the diversity in a women’s audience, the sophistication, the thoughtfulness, the fun-loving spirit, the flirtations, the detailed, the subtle. She wants her audience to make their own film.
In a time of national borders and increasing geographic chauvinism, she finds images of women transcending boundaries and cultures while at the same time acting as spokespeople for cultural difference.
Audience © Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Barbara Hammer
Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS
Barbara Hammer first heard of AIDS in 1985 while she was teaching at Columbia College in Chicago. She noticed the strange and inflammatory articles appearing in newspapers and asked her students to collect hysterical headlines for her. This marked the beginning of her work on Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS.
In this project, she examined the public ignorance, stigmatization and fundamentally misguided attitudes surrounding the new illness. By creating a snowstorm of newspaper clippings, she aimed to reveal the extent to which the media was producing a “snow job”.
Snow Job © Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Barbara Hammer
A Horse is Not a Metaphor
As a cancer ‘thriver’ rather than ‘survivor’, Barbara Hammer rides the red hills of Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, the grassy foothills of the Big Horn in Wyoming, and leafy paths in Woodstock, New York, changing illness into recovery. Soundtrack door Meredith Monk.
A Horse is Not a Metaphor © Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York