The first part of the retrospective features Barbara Hammer’s short films—from her early experimentations on film in the late 1960s and some iconic works of the 1970s that have been recognized as the first cinematic manifestations of female homosexuality and liberated physicality, to one of her last pictures, A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, documenting the filmmaker’s fight with cancer.
Barbara Ward Will Never Die
“Barbara Ward Will Never Die” is inscribed on the tombstone placed by the artist among other graves in the cemetery. In 1968 Hammer was still using her husband’s name, Ward, and was just starting to make films with an 8mm camera—but she already knew she would have a place in history books. This is a short movie about the eternity of art suddenly turned prophetic.
USA, 1968. 3 min. 18+
I was/ I am
One of Hammer’s earliest experimentations with 16mm film, I was/ I am was inspired by Maya Deren’s mystical paintings. The young artist manifests her new identity and liberated sexuality by remodeling herself from a girl in a dress into a leather-clad biker.
USA, 1973. 6 min. 18+
Menses
Menses is an ironic statement on the taboo side of female physiology. Blending experimental comedy and drama, Hammer caricatures the inconveniences women face and raises the issues of body politics and shame culture that remain relevant today.
USA, 1974. 3 min. 18+
Dyketactics
A lesbian video commercial in the artist’s own joking words, Dyketactics is considered the firm film made by an open lesbian and explicitly depicting female pleasure and sexuality. These four minutes of frankness shocked their first spectators but went down in history as an avant-garde effort to articulate the nature of female homosexuality.
USA, 1974. 4 min. 18+
Women I Love
Barbara Hammer’s films of the 1970s are pervaded with sensuality, eroticism, and harmony. Women I Love is a delicate cinematic poem, where home portraits of friends and lovers are mixed with close-ups of vegetables and fruits resembling the contours of a female body.
USA, 1976. 23 min. 18+
Pools
According to Hammer, Pools is primarily an experiment with the viewer’s attention. She wanted to expand her experience in the pool with the help of the camera and give a chance to share it with others. Shot in a pool designed by Julia Morgan—the first woman to ever be admitted to the Faculty of Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris—this piece is set to “activate” the audience by allowing it to “float” together with the camera.
Dir. Barbara Hammer, Barbara Klutinis
USA, 1981. 6 min. 18+
Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape
Documentation of a famous performance in which Hammer, wearing a mask she made herself using New York subway maps, sits down with strangers in a carriage and talks to them about the city, life, and public spaces.
USA, 1985. 12 min. 18+
No No Nooky TV
Shot on 16mm film using the Amiga operating system, No No Nooky TV implements a programming language to reveal the influence of technology on the sphere of emotions and feelings. Even the monitor in this movie becomes an object of sexual attraction, mocking romance, sentiments, and love in the post-industrial era.
USA, 1987. 12 min. 18+
A Horse Is Not A Metaphor
Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006, Hammer would fight it over the next thirteen years. In her experimental film A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, she tells the story of her battle with the disease, using cinema as psychotherapy and moving from documenting her chemotherapy sessions to abstract representations of light and movement that help to take her away from the hospital bed.
USA, 2008. 29 min. 18+