{"id":15418,"date":"2026-09-11T20:32:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T20:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/culturalleft.org\/cl\/2026\/09\/11\/in-barbara-forever-a-pioneer-of-lesbian-experimental-film-is-lovingly-remembered-culture-the-indypendent\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T20:32:02","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T20:32:02","slug":"in-barbara-forever-a-pioneer-of-lesbian-experimental-film-is-lovingly-remembered-culture-the-indypendent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturalleft.org\/cl\/2026\/09\/11\/in-barbara-forever-a-pioneer-of-lesbian-experimental-film-is-lovingly-remembered-culture-the-indypendent\/","title":{"rendered":"In \u201cBarbara Forever,\u201d A Pioneer of Lesbian Experimental Film is Lovingly Remembered\u00a0 Culture \u2013 The Indypendent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019s work includes classics like <em>Dyketactics<\/em> and <em>Nitrate Kisses<\/em>, 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. \u201cI\u2019m creating a lesbian history in a world in which we are invisible,\u201d Hammer said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019Connor, who first encountered Hammer when researching her senior thesis on queer cinema, attempts to trace Hammer\u2019s life in <em>Barbara Forever<\/em>, which is currently in limited theatrical release.\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"577\" src=\"https:\/\/indypendent.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/CApwWBoA-1024x577.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-46810\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">(Photo courtesy of the estate of Barbara Hammer).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">O\u2019Connor, true to her subject\u2019s artistic sensibilities, rejects a linear, conventional documentary format for a more holistic view of Hammer\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Barbara Forever<\/em> does not spend much time on Hammer\u2019s 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\u2014the first time she heard the word lesbian as a 30 year old.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\">\n<blockquote>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019t particularly open to queer women. \u201cYou have to choose between being a lesbian filmmaker and an avant-garde filmmaker. Lesbians wanted realism, avant-garde didn\u2019t want lesbians,\u201d Hammer says.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still, she managed to do it and both experimental and queer cinema are all the better for it, <em>Barabara Forever<\/em> shows. The documentary looks at her early work such as <em>Dyketactics<\/em> which shows women entangled, having sex, existing in nature. <em>Double Strength<\/em>, also featured, is centered on Hammer\u2019s ex-lover and trapeze artist Terry Sendgraff performing nude, with Hammer appearing occasionally. Besides their aesthetic quality, Hammer\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">O\u2019Connor 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. \u201cI want this screen to be tactile\u2026 [Touch] is what a lesbian aesthetic film is about,\u201d was Hammer\u2019s ethos. One of the most poignant examples of this is <em>Nitrate Kisses,<\/em> which <em>Barbara Forever<\/em> 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 <em>Nitrate Kisses<\/em>. One man tells the camera \u201cI see more baby dykes running around than I ever have before, and that\u2019s all your fault, Barbara.\u201d) <em>Nitrate Kisses<\/em> 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 <em><\/em>went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"922\" src=\"https:\/\/indypendent.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/YwKXVi6g.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-46811\" \/><\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That the <em>Nitrate Kisses<\/em> was made during the horrors of the AIDS epidemic is only gestured at by O\u2019Connor, rather than examined. It\u2019s a weak point present in other aspects of <em>Barbara Forever<\/em>. 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\u2019s film <em>Audience<\/em>, where Hammer interviews women waiting in line to watch her films, an interviewee tells Hammer \u201cI 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\u2019t expect it from most commercial films\u2026I do expect it from women and lesbians.\u201d 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\">\n<blockquote>\n<p>Besides their aesthetic quality, Hammer\u2019s films are unique in how seriously she takes the body in all its beauty and sometimes its oddity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">None of Hammer\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s final films. The film\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Barbara Forever<\/em> is a masterpiece of editing and of collaboration. Though produced and filmed after her death, Hammer\u2019s artistic and even editorial direction is ever-present. Rather than a documentary of a now-deceased artist, O\u2019Connor 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\u2019s insights into her and Hammer\u2019s long partnership and into Hammer herself illuminate the film.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Particularly moving is one of the final scenes of Burke, in which she is talking to O\u2019Connor, who is behind the camera, telling her she wonders what Hammer would think of the small dog she adopted after her partner\u2019s death. Burke goes on to tell O\u2019Connor she talks to Hammer often and imagines her responses.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201c\u2018You got in front of the camera? You\u2019ve done that so much, <em>after I<\/em> died?!\u2019 She\u2019d be a little angry about that,\u201d says Burke to O\u2019Connor on what she imagines Hammer\u2019s reaction to her being onscreen after a lifetime of resistance would be. O\u2019Connor, in her only line in the film, asks Burke why she is choosing to appear on camera only now. To which she replies: \u201cBecause I promised her that her work would live on.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Barbara Forever <\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Directed by<\/em> <em>Brydie O\u2019Connor<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Space Time Films, out now at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.barbaraforeverfilm.com\/screenings\">select theaters<\/a><\/em> <em>including Film Forum until September 17th<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>102 minutes<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\n<\/p><p><a href=\"https:\/\/indypendent.org\/2026\/09\/in-barbara-forever-a-pioneer-of-lesbian-experimental-film-is-lovingly-remembered\/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"feedzy-rss-link-icon\">Read More<\/a><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/indypendent.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/CApwWBoA-1024x577.jpeg\" title=\"In \u201cBarbara Forever,\u201d A Pioneer of Lesbian Experimental Film is Lovingly Remembered\u00a0\" \/><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15419,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>In \u201cBarbara Forever,\u201d A Pioneer of Lesbian Experimental Film is Lovingly Remembered\u00a0 Culture \u2013 The Indypendent - Cultural Left<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/culturalleft.org\/cl\/2026\/09\/11\/in-barbara-forever-a-pioneer-of-lesbian-experimental-film-is-lovingly-remembered-culture-the-indypendent\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In \u201cBarbara Forever,\u201d A Pioneer of Lesbian Experimental Film is Lovingly Remembered\u00a0 Culture \u2013 The Indypendent - Cultural Left\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Barbara Hammer said she was born at the age of 30, when she became a lesbian. 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