Barbara Hammer

1920’s Surrealist artists Claude Cahun and marcel Moore come to life in this hybrid documentary. Lesbians and step-sisters, the gender-bending artists lived and worked together all their lives. Heroic resisters to the Nazis occupying Jersey Isle during WWII, they ...  (more)

Maya Deren's Sink, a 30 minute experimental film, is an evocative tribute to the mother of avantgarde American film. The film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Teiji Ito's family, Carolee Schneemann and ...  (more)

Generations is a 30 minute 16mm film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Barbara Hammer, 70 years old, hands the camera to Gina Carducci, a young queer filmmaker. Shooting during the last days of Astroland at Coney ...  (more)

NO NO NOOKY TV posits sexuality to be a social construct in a "sex-text" of satiric graphic representation of "dirty pictures." Made on an Amiga Computer and shot in 16mm film, NO NO NOOKY TV confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic ...  (more)

A hand plays with a vagina as the same scene drifts over a sea of erotic rock formations.  (more)

Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of ...  (more)

"Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve is a powerful personal reflection on family and aging. Hammer employs filmed footage which, through optical printing and editing, is layered and manipulated to create a compelling meditation on her visit to her grandmother in a nursing ...  (more)

Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the ...  (more)

What do construction workers do in their well-earned breaks? How might Angelina Jolie's and Brad Pitt's relationship have ended? And what really happened between Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford during the summer of 1959? The answers to these and many other ...  (more)

Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rare, historical film and video footage, this feature documentary reveals how art addressing political consequences of discrimination and violence, the Feminist Art Revolution radically transformed the art and ...  (more)

A montage of film clips and stills calling all lesbians to come out and celebrate who they are. In a trilogy of experimental documentaries, director Barbara Hammer rewrites history by inserting lesbians and lesbian imagery throughout educational films, newsreels, ...  (more)

Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on ...  (more)

In “Vital Signs” (1991), Barbara Hammer demonstratively transforms the horror of death into its opposite. She tenderly cares for a human skeleton, feeding it, dressing and caressing it, taking it for walks in the dark cabaret of an intimate relationship beyond ...  (more)

Hammer used old x-ray footage, rearranged, colored and orchestrated through optical printing, in order to reveal hidden bodily movements and rhythms in its constant juxtaposition.  (more)

The filmmaker, fighting ovarian cancer, stage 3, returns to her experimental roots, in a multilayered film of numerous chemotherapy sessions with images of light and movement that take her far from the hospital bed. A a cancer ‘thriver’ rather than ’survivor’, ...  (more)

Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized ...  (more)

Masculinity/Femininity is an experimental film project interrogating normative notions of gender, sexuality and performance. Shot primarily on Super 8, the project merges academic and creative critique -- a document of gender de-construction rather than a ...  (more)

Welcome To This House, a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop, is about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full lesbian disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop's best loved homes in the U.S., Canada, and ...  (more)

Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties and ...  (more)

This video documentary centers on the questions of civil liberties and cultural differences in a society beginning to open as one woman searches for her own ethnic roots, identity and family history in Ukraine. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homophobia, ...  (more)