Barbara Hammer said she was born at the age of 30, when she became a lesbian. What followed was a prolific career and bountiful life: Hammer made more than 90 films over the course of fifty years, becoming a pioneer in queer cinema with work that centered lesbian life and love, often with herself and her lovers as subjects. Hammer’s work includes classics like Dyketactics and Nitrate Kisses, which like their filmmaker, were staunchly lesbian, radical and feminist, erotic and strange, and visually stunning. Her body of work is abundant with tender, raw depictions of queer women onscreen at a time when they rarely saw themselves. “I’m creating a lesbian history in a world in which we are invisible,” Hammer said.
Hammer died in 2019 at age of 79 from ovarian cancer, leaving behind a vast archive and a legacy of revolutionizing queer and experimental film. The filmmaker Brydie O’Connor, who first encountered Hammer when researching her senior thesis on queer cinema, attempts to trace Hammer’s life in Barbara Forever, which is currently in limited theatrical release.
O’Connor, true to her subject’s artistic sensibilities, rejects a linear, conventional documentary format for a more holistic view of Hammer’s life and art. The documentary is made up almost entirely of archival footage and narrated by Hammer (in recordings from videos she created prior to her death), interrupted only by conversations with those who knew her, most prominently her life partner, Florrie Burke. The footage, narration, and interviews complement each other, resulting in a beautiful remembrance of a singular artist.
Barbara Forever does not spend much time on Hammer’s childhood and teenage years in Southern California. It also does not dwell on her first marriage to a man, only showing her struggle with her brief time being reduced to a housewife (even on a hippie-esque commune) and on a motorcycle trip the two took around the world as context for the same trip she later took with a girlfriend. Instead, the documentary largely begins when Hammer said her life did—the first time she heard the word lesbian as a 30 year old.
After her first sexual experience with a woman, Hammer set out to show, via film, what being in and with a queer, lesbian body feels like.
After her first sexual experience with a woman, Hammer set out to show, via film, what being in and with a queer, lesbian body feels like. Her chosen medium was experimental film, which at the time, she says, wasn’t particularly open to queer women. “You have to choose between being a lesbian filmmaker and an avant-garde filmmaker. Lesbians wanted realism, avant-garde didn’t want lesbians,” Hammer says.
Still, she managed to do it and both experimental and queer cinema are all the better for it, Barabara Forever shows. The documentary looks at her early work such as Dyketactics which shows women entangled, having sex, existing in nature. Double Strength, also featured, is centered on Hammer’s ex-lover and trapeze artist Terry Sendgraff performing nude, with Hammer appearing occasionally. Besides their aesthetic quality, Hammer’s films are unique in how seriously she takes the body in all its beauty and its oddity. She is unabashed with her erotic, curious, and sometimes reverent view of love and sex between women, in contrast to the hypersexualized, male-centered, pornographic material that also existed at the time.
O’Connor successfully imparts that filmmaking was an inherently visceral and sensual experience for Hammer. Her work sought to reflect the sensory experiences of her life as a lesbian woman, a personal mission rendered political. “I want this screen to be tactile… [Touch] is what a lesbian aesthetic film is about,” was Hammer’s ethos. One of the most poignant examples of this is Nitrate Kisses, which Barbara Forever shows premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993 (footage from a camcorder shows the queer people there commenting on how many more of them there are this year, thanks to Nitrate Kisses. One man tells the camera “I see more baby dykes running around than I ever have before, and that’s all your fault, Barbara.”) Nitrate Kisses combines interviews and archival footage of LGBTQ+ history with sex scenes between four gay and lesbian couples, including elderly lesbians and interracial couples. Made all the more poignant because it was filmed and produced during the AIDS crisis, and went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
That the Nitrate Kisses was made during the horrors of the AIDS epidemic is only gestured at by O’Connor, rather than examined. It’s a weak point present in other aspects of Barbara Forever. In her early work shown in the documentary, the bodies of the queer women depicted are all white and overwhelmingly thin and cisgender. During a clip of Hammer’s film Audience, where Hammer interviews women waiting in line to watch her films, an interviewee tells Hammer “I feel empowered when I see anything that closely relates to me. As a Black woman, I see very little of that in terms of my own personal image. I don’t expect it from most commercial films…I do expect it from women and lesbians.” The question if she feels represented or empowered is not answered. Later, the transmasculine filmmaker Joey Carducci who collaborated with Hammer later in her life says that he worried about coming out to her, saying he didn’t want her to think he was anti-lesbian, or anti-butch, or anti-feminist. Not exploring if those worries were founded, and if there is the tension between Hammer having created radical work that still had its limits, is a missed opportunity.
Besides their aesthetic quality, Hammer’s films are unique in how seriously she takes the body in all its beauty and sometimes its oddity.
None of Hammer’s work is presented chronologically, and is interspersed through home-video footage from Hammer, leaving with the audience an understanding that for Hammer, life and art were often one. Still, though not linear, the viewer does understand the chronology of Hammer’s life: her experiences with love and work with various partners, the tension that sometimes came from combining them, her foray into the art world in San Francisco and New York, her life with Burke and her grappling with mortality at the end of her life, some of which is depicted in Hammer’s final films. The film’s final hour spends time with the work she created while living with ovarian cancer, filming light through chemo bags and herself writhing on the floor naked as a way to show what her illness felt like.
Barbara Forever is a masterpiece of editing and of collaboration. Though produced and filmed after her death, Hammer’s artistic and even editorial direction is ever-present. Rather than a documentary of a now-deceased artist, O’Connor creates an organized presentation of an archive in the way she believes Hammer would have wanted it. This is also thanks to Florrie Burke, who hated being on camera and who Hammer only managed to capture stealthily during her lifetime but sat down to be interviewed for the documentary. Burke’s insights into her and Hammer’s long partnership and into Hammer herself illuminate the film.
Particularly moving is one of the final scenes of Burke, in which she is talking to O’Connor, who is behind the camera, telling her she wonders what Hammer would think of the small dog she adopted after her partner’s death. Burke goes on to tell O’Connor she talks to Hammer often and imagines her responses.
“‘You got in front of the camera? You’ve done that so much, after I died?!’ She’d be a little angry about that,” says Burke to O’Connor on what she imagines Hammer’s reaction to her being onscreen after a lifetime of resistance would be. O’Connor, in her only line in the film, asks Burke why she is choosing to appear on camera only now. To which she replies: “Because I promised her that her work would live on.”
Barbara Forever
Directed by Brydie O’Connor
Space Time Films, out now at select theaters including Film Forum until September 17th
102 minutes
