2013 (Production)

2013-10-01 (Production)

English (Original)

Interviewee: Barbara Hammer
Interviewer: Sienna McLean LoGreco

Professional production

United States

Barbara Hammer is interviewed by Jim Hubbard at the Lighthouse Theater in New York City in 2013. Hammer discusses her upbringing in Los Angeles, her initial entry into art and filmmaking, and her politics as a lesbian, feminist artist. She details the creation of her works from SCHIZY (1968) to MAYA DEREN’S SINK (2010) and GENERATIONS (2010).

Barbara Hammer is interviewed by Jim Hubbard at the Lighthouse Theater in New York City on October 1, 2013. Hammer discusses her early life in Hollywood, California and studies at UCLA in the early 1960s where she became interested in art and its potential to bring about social change. She recounts coming out as a lesbian in her early thirties and beginning to make films from a forthright feminist point of view in a style influenced by pioneers of experimental film. She explains her interest in breaking narrative conventions and focusing on sexual, romantic, and familial relationships within lesbian communities in films which also explore the implications of queer and feminist theory. Throughout this interview, Hammer speaks to how she has been forced to defend her work, sometimes in the face of undue censorship, recounting an incident where her film SUPERDYKE (1975) was falsely targeted by the vice squad as child pornography. A teacher and advocate for education, she details her own lifelong learning as well as her efforts to instruct and give back to others who create art. Hammer provides vivid insight into her working process for films across her career, including JANE BRAKHAGE (1975), OPTIC NERVE (1985), NITRATE KISSES (1992), and HISTORY LESSONS (2000), and shares how she continues to find inspiration to create. She talks candidly about her experience with ovarian cancer and how she produced A HORSE IS NOT A METAPHOR (2008) while ill. She also illuminates her creative collaborations and describes her efforts to document and archive her life’s work.

Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) was an artist and experimental filmmaker whose teaching practice began in the early 1960s. Hammer was recognized as a pioneer within multiple filmmaking traditions including queer, feminist, activist, and experimental cinema. Coming out as a lesbian in 1970, she addressed a range of themes in her more than eighty films and videos, including queer sexuality and taboos surrounding the female body beginning with early works like DYKETACTICS (1974) and MENSES (1974). A highly personal filmmaker, she confronts her own cancer diagnosis and aging in A HORSE IS NOT A METAPHOR (2008). Hammer employed a variety of techniques in the creation and presentation of her work from optical printing to innovative projection. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 to make WELCOME TO THIS HOUSE (2015). Hammer has been the subject of retrospectives at MOMA, Centre Pompidou, and the Tate Modern, and was twice nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival for NITRATE KISSES (1992) and TENDER FICTIONS (1996).

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