Barbara Hammer’s desire as an artist was to live forever. A new documentary about the pioneering lesbian filmmaker is furthering that goal.
Barbara Forever, directed by Brydie O’Connor, won the Berlinale’s queer film honor, the Teddy Award, for Best Documentary/Essay Film this weekend, after winning the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Teddy Award jurors wrote, “This compelling documentary traces the evolution of a visionary filmmaker for whom living a lesbian life and finding adequate representation thereof were inseparable from her experimental practice.”
At a talk about the film as part of the EFM’s DocSalon, O’Connor explained she began researching Hammer’s work almost a decade ago.
“I was in school and I was writing my thesis on her filmography of the ‘70s… and I couldn’t access her films anywhere,” O’Connor said. “I couldn’t find them online or in the library system. And so, I reached out to Barbara directly and she sent me her DVDs… I met her a few times in New York, but when she passed, I reached out to her widow, Florrie Burke, to send my condolences and to let her know how much she meant to me and my own trajectory. And Florrie and I became quite close and have been collaborating on different iterations of the Barbara Hammer project since.”
O’Connor made the 2022 short film, Love, Barbara, before embarking on the feature.
“The short, Love, Barbara, is through the perspective of Florrie Burke,” O’Connor noted. “Florrie not only narrates it, but it’s through the lens of their love story for over 31 years. So, it’s kind of the ruby red gemstone of Barbara’s greatest love. And I initially was so attracted to that story because Barbara put her lovers on screen and she put her personal life on screen, but Florrie didn’t appear in any of her films. I was so curious why that was. Florrie and I collaborated, and as I was making the short, I just continued to find so much material, and we were digitizing much of the archive at the time as well. And that included hours and hours and hours of audio recordings that Barbara had both left in her archive and just oral histories and interviews she had done with other filmmakers and artists and friends.”
O’Connor continued, “I really wanted Barbara to be able to tell her own story. She talked about everything. She recorded everything. So that was really the genesis, the core idea of Barbara Forever… that Barbara was the expert on her own life and career. And I think in that way, the short can exist in conversation with the feature. Now, it feels additive.”
Hammer was born in Los Angeles in 1939 and groomed to be a child star by her mother, who saw young Barbara as a future Shirley Temple. But Barbara’s parents couldn’t afford the dance and acting training necessary to make that dream a reality and Hammer followed a more conventional path to adulthood, marrying a man at age 22. She came out at age 30, declaring in the film, “I was born when I became a lesbian.” A creative explosion followed that saw Hammer make numerous films in quick succession, breaking taboos in the process — her works celebrated lesbian love, featured nudity and frankly erotic scenes.
Tactility suffused her work. Hammer regarded film not merely as a medium but as a physical entity – she often scratched frames or painted on them.
“I think that sense of wanting to transfer feeling through film was constant,” O’Connor explained. “It was a through line in her work. It’s really the DNA that carries us through the decades, the five decades of work that she was making.”
The film traces Hammer’s long effort to get her films seen and embraced. Their experimental nature and immersion in lesbian love often provoked rejection depending on the taste or orientation of the viewer.
“Barbara constantly felt the tension between being a lesbian filmmaker and making lesbian work and also making avant-garde work,” O’Connor said. “She really didn’t feel like she fit neatly into either lane or into either community — artistic community or queer community. She says she felt like [lesbians] wanted to see reality cinema and weren’t as interested in her experimentation, and experimental film [in general]. And she says the experimental film community was male-dominated, and she found that it was a challenge for people in the art world to care about not only lesbians, but a nude woman’s body on screen, which was certainly a through line in Barbara’s work.”
It took persistence and time for Hammer’s oeuvre to be accepted on a larger scale, but eventually her work gained exposure at the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 1985, 1989, and 1993. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted a month-long exhibition to her work. In 2017, two years before Hammer’s death at the age of 79, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University acquired her archives.
Barbara Forever next screens at the True/False Film Fest in Columbia, MO in March.
Early in the documentary, Hammer notes, “I’m creating a lesbian history in a world where we’re invisible.” We asked O’Connor how much she feels things have changed societally in the intervening years since Hammer made that observation.
“I think that there’s certainly more representation of queer life and queer bodies in the media today, but I think what’s so fascinating and so singular about Barbara’s work is that it’s so personal,” O’Connor commented. “I’ve been saying about this project that the personal is not only political, but the personal is historical. And I think it’s so important — it’s more important now than ever — for us as queer artists and women and creative risk takers, really each of us, to continue making work that feels so true to what we want to express or what we want to explore, ask questions about. That incredibly personal lens is always going to be something that is urgently needed.”
English (US) ·