By the very nature of her multifaceted identity, lesbian feminist filmmaker and artist Barbara Hammer (b. 1939) has maintained a formal fluidity in her half-century-long practice effectively unparalleled by any living moving image maker. From her first Super 8 experiment, Schizy (1968), Hammer gave herself permission to fearlessly follow her instincts. Through her explicit and politically-charged work of the 1970s to her material interactions and printing exercises of the 1980s and continuing with her seamless adoption of analog and digital video, Hammer’s visual lyricism and sensuality dance invariably within each of her over 80 moving image works in a conscious, active (re)writing and (re)defining of a singular cinematic language.

Capturing subjects considered verboten—joyous lesbian sensuality, female sexual pleasure, aging, death and dying, menstruation—Hammer boldly confronts normative representations of women and characterizations of gender expression, commanding and claiming space for a refreshingly new aesthetic and sensibility, queer or otherwise, in experimental film that continues to inspire generations of artists across myriad layers of identification. Her inclusion of queer women in works both traditionally documentative and those more performative allowed for not just increased visibility of lesbian culture in their day, but also an invaluable archive of the ever-evolving political and social objectives of communities often rendered invisible.

With the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Archive is proud to present five programs of films by Barbara Hammer, nearly all of which will be shown in restored or newly struck prints from the Academy Film Archive. A screening of Hammer’s debut feature Nitrate Kisses (1992) will also take place at AFI FEST on November 11.

This program was curated by KJ Relth and Mark Toscano; program notes written by the same.

Special thanks: Florrie Burke; Karl McCool, Electronic Arts Intermix; May Haduong, Academy Film Archive.