Every work begins with a blank screen. This is what Barbara Hammer felt the first time she watched a Maya Deren film: “Until then, that screen of ‘film history’ had been blank from a woman’s point of view. When I saw it, I knew with absolute certainty that I would make films.”
Hammer was surrounded by the world of cinema all her life. She was born in 1939 in Los Angeles and her mother was obsessed with her becoming the new Shirley Temple. “Maybe I was ‘saved’ from Hollywood thanks to depression and my parents’ small income,” she would say in an interview in 1991, because the directors of castings They rejected her because of her working-class family ways.
However, her journey to deciding to experiment with images was not entirely linear. Although she had always been interested in cinema, especially that which was outside the more commercial circuit, she graduated from the University of California in psychology, followed by a master’s degree in English literary studies in 1963. It was not until the early 1970s that she decided to study film.
Hammer shot his first short film, Squizyin 1968, at a time of self-discovery. These are reflected in her small experiments in which she often focuses on herself with the camera, in front of a rear-view mirror or a mirror. It was during this time of change that she heard the word “lesbian” for the first time, already at the age of 30.
After separating from her husband, she recorded ‘Dykedactics’, a short film in which the discovery of her sexuality redefines all aesthetics with a look that wants to represent the experience of lesbianism.
After separating from her husband she recorded Dykedacticsa short film in which the discovery of her sexuality redefines all aesthetics with a view that wants to represent the experience of lesbianism, breaking with that lack of images about lesbian experience, and therefore breaking with the invisibility that existed until then in the cinema. Dyketactics our eyes meet the body and rediscover it.
“Women who stimulate and embrace each other are not divisible into one. This idea reinforced my desire to express myself in multiple images through superimpositions,” Hammer would comment on Dykedactics.
Hammer’s films are nothing like mainstream films, but neither are they like those of other lesbian directors such as Chantal Akerman, in which lesbian sexuality still barely knows how to present itself, where sex is almost mechanical, as if she wanted to highlight the barrier that exists between two people.
In Hammer, none of this happens; the beauty of the images, superimposed, that reach us like warm waves, introduces us to his world in a hypnotic way.
In Audience (1983), Hammer asks several of his female viewers at the entrance and exit of a screening of his films what they think of his cinema, or what they hope to find in it. One of them says something particularly enlightening about his cinema: “I had never felt the corporeality of cinema until tonight. The only kind of corporeality I had ever felt through cinema before was with pornography, which always gives you the sensation of seeing yourself from the outside.”
What is surprising is how Hammer’s gaze shows female bodies without objectifying them. The result of this way of filming produces a sensation contrary to observing your own body from the outside.
Hammer is able to show the sensoriality of images in a way that they almost touch us. What is surprising is how Hammer’s gaze shows female bodies without objectifying them. The result of this way of filming produces a sensation contrary to observing your own body from the outside, a dissociation from our own image that women have to deal with continuously, as John Berger explained in his Ways of seeing: “Men look at women. Women observe themselves being observed. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relationship of women to themselves. The observer of the woman herself is male: the woman observed. In this way, she becomes an object, and more particularly an object of vision.”
Hammer changes this fact, by placing the camera close to her own body she manages to subvert the male gaze, returning her own gaze in her images. Becoming aware of her own image and how it is perceived, she introduces the possibility of returning the gaze and taking sides, becoming a subject.
This is how Hammer films sex, for example, almost as an enchantment in its absolute naturalness. In these scenes, the images transmit the corporality of someone who is rediscovering their body, their sexuality. In the same way that Annie Ernaux makes us rediscover everyday life through her writing, or her cinema, as in the Super 8 years, Hammer allows us to access a recognition of our own body through the images that she offers.
Because Hammer’s cinema is a cinema that is born from the body and communicates with the body. He used the camera with kinesthetic effects, in such a way that it amplifies bodily sensations, as can be seen in Pond and WaterfallIn this short film, shot in 1982, Hammer immerses the camera in the water, moving from the slow, gentle rhythm of the surface of a pond to the frenetic movement of the water falling in a waterfall until it flows into the sea. “By making the camera swim, I make the audience swim, so that they will not only appreciate the pristine and unique nature of an ecosystem, but they will also recognize their personal and psychological involvement,” explained the director herself in an interview published by Art Papers in 1991.
In this way, the viewers’ bodies no longer behave passively, but the images require their active participation, an assimilation of the rhythm of the water at its own pace, to the flow of its own blood and breathing.
Throughout his career, Hammer continued to experiment with different textures and formats to bring us closer to the material but also to natural processes, playing with space and time, as happens in Stonesin which he makes us participants in an attempt to shape time and which reminds us of Ritual in Transfigured Time by Maya Deren.
In the 90s he would continue to claim LGBT rights and would begin to focus on feature films, such as Nitrate Kisses (1992), which he built with archive images —a technique that he would repeat in other films such as History Lessons y The Female Closetwhere she reconstructs a lesbian story through archive images—and interviews with homosexual couples. In this way, Hammer tried to get into the cracks, into those images denied by canonical historiography and propose a genealogy. Perhaps that is why she herself said that she chose “film and video as a means to make the invisible visible. Anyone can be left out of history. I am forced to reveal and celebrate marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told.”
During the first decade of the 2000s he continued producing feature films such as My Grandmother (2001), an investigation into his Ukrainian ancestry, and Resisting Paradise (2003). Despite being diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006, during the time she lived with the disease she made seven more films, one of them dedicated precisely to her life with the threat of cancer, Horse is not a Metaphor (2008), in which he speaks with complete honesty about the illness but also about those new visions that the present continuous to which the sick person is circumscribed grants.
He also made numerous documentaries, such as Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), a tribute to Maya Deren in which Deren’s own films are projected in the house where they were recorded, and Welcome to this house (2015), in which he talks about Elizabeth Bishop while walking through the houses that the poet lived in with her partners.
Before she died in 2019 from cancer, she left us a new way of understanding the image, expanding our way of perceiving and perceiving ourselves. As she herself said: “My films are often described as visionary, but I am not. I live my life as a lesbian. I am not waiting. My life is my vision. By documenting what others would call visionary, what I would call ‘action’, I hope to spark the public’s imagination.”
