In Tourist, Barbara Hammer depicts a trip to Europe: the flow of images is manipulated with a syncopated rhythm, to alter the perception of places that appear well-known and to instill a feeling of anxiety ...

"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 home. The sense of sight becomes a constantly evolving process of reseeing images retrieved from the past and fused into the eternal present of the projected image. Hammer has lent a new voice to the long tradition of personal meditation in the avant-garde of the American independent cinema." -- John Hanhardt, Biennial Exhibition Catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1987

An experimental film with lesbian themes

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, feminism and a divided and economically-depressed country are encountered as Barbara Hammer, a feminist activist and pioneer of lesbian cinema, return to a “homeland” full of struggling as people search for a new post-glasnost identity.

Using the sixth century B.C. lyricist's poetry, a group of women unwrap the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life. Made by Barbara and six students, together at the Women's Building in Los Angeles.

A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation where women act out their own dramas on a California hillside, in a supermarket, in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. MENSES combines both the imagery and the politics of menstruation in a fine blend of comedy and drama.

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.

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 International Women's Day, and tap dances on Shirley Temple's star on Hollywood Boulevard. This child movie star was the ideal by which Hammer's ambitious mother measured her own Barbie. Grandma, already a cook for Lillian Gish in Hollywood, introduced the cute, loquacious child and her mother to D.W. Griffith. Lesbian autobiography is a slender genre, so Hammer draws from general culture studies for critique and to provide an ironic edge to the synthesized "voices of authority".

Hammer’s 2003 film Resisting Paradise, which deals with the concept of art as a tool of political resistance, was especially fascinating to me. Hammer, who was doing a painting residency in Cassis, France, when war broke out in Kosovo, found herself questioning the validity of art in the face of political conflict and unrest. She began exploring the history of the French Resistance in Cassis, and used that as a chance to reflect on how Cassis’ artistic community, both those who were threatened by the Nazi occupation of France and those who were able to remain relatively neutral, reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War.

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, medical footage and more from the past century.

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

A comedy about a troop of shield-bearing Amazons who take over city institutions before relaxing in the country. "Superdyke" takes women into the streets when Barbara arms of a platoon of vagina warriors with Amazon shields in an attempt to overthrow San Francisco. They march through City Hall, usurp the bus lines, demythologiz the consumer mentality at Macy's (to the recorded astonishment of casual shoppers), and wander through the erotic art museum. Barbara's frenetic handheld lens catches the startled reactions and the glee of the participants. SUPERDYKE has a home-movie quality to it, but its committed and loose moments in the playground confirm its comic rationale.

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 Brazil, believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends,and scholars provide missing documents of numerous female lovers. Bishop's intimate poems and the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara bring the poet into our lives with new facts and unexpected details.

Barbara Hammer interviews a lesbian couple, both gymnasts and performance artists and photographs them doing their routines in the nude.

‘Still Point’ serves as Barbara Hammer’s definitive reassessment of 70’s cultural feminism. She literally places side-by-side the romantic image of her companion walking and stretching under the sun in a landscape and the gritty realism of a methodical garbage picker on the street of New York city, pushing a shopping cart and moving on to the next waste container. Our world view must encompass both realities, the film indicates. Privilege can’t obscure vision.

Barbara Hammer’s Audience (1981) is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking.

The Female Closet uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian stories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies, and archival photographs, and other visual sources, The Female Closet is a cultural interrogation of the closeted and not-so-closeted lives of three women artists.

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 late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan. These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.

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 lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.