2018, 9:30 min, color, sound, three-channel HD video
"...The work is experienced and perceived through the performer’s body as we breathe together remembering that cancer is not a 'battle,' cancer is a disease..."
— Barbara Hammer
2015, 6:35 min, color, sound, HD video
is a video animation of Hammer’s early notebook drawings set to a sound track of commentary by the artist’s friends and peers.
2015, HD video, color/B&W/sound by Joan La Barbara, 79 min.
Feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure.
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2011, HD video, color/B&W/sound by Meredith Monk, 30 min.
Maya Deren’s Sink explores Deren’s concepts of space, time and form through visits and projections filmed in her LA and NY homes.
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2008, DVD, color/B&W/sound by Meredith Monk, 30 min.
The filmmaker, fighting ovarian cancer, stage 3, returns to her experimental roots, in a multilayered film of numerous chemotherapy sessions with images of light and movement that take her far from the hospital bed.
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2003, 16mm film, color/B&S/sound, 80 min.
Featuring captivating interviews with former Resistance workers Lisa Fittko (who smuggled Walter Benjamin out of France), Marie-Ange Allibert, and Matisse’s grandchildren, rare archival footage, and lush cinematography,
Resisting Paradise is a compelling look at the intersection of art and life in complex times.
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2001, 3:36 min, color, sound
Hammer documents a demonstration and, in so doing, makes her own contribution to the national post–September 11 dialogue.
2001, video, 53 min., color/sound.
Documentary centering 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.
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2000, 16mm film, 66 min, color/sound.
In this wonderfully irreverent yet empowering film, Barbara Hammer traces lesbian history by presenting an extraordinary array of archival footage – and then playfully manipulates it to make it seem as though lesbians were everywhere.
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Devotion investigates the extremely complex and hierarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke.
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1998, 60 minutes, color, sound, 1998
The Female Closet is documentary that uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian histories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman.
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1995, 16mm film, 58 min, color/sound.
Pioneer lesbian-feminist filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, constructs an autobiography before someone does it for her in this post-postmodern sequel to her award-winning documentary Nitrate Kisses.
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1994, video, color/sound, 51 min.
A documentary about a country in the state of transition; specifically of lesbians and gays, black and white, Indian and Asian, from townships, cities and rural areas who speak of their lives and desires as homosexuals in post-apartheid South Africa.
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1992, 16 mm film, 67 min, B&W/sound.
Barbara Hammer's first feature film weaves striking images of four gay and lesbian couples with footage of an unearthed forbidden and invisible history.
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1991, 9:41 min, b&w and color, sound, 16 mm film on video
"With so many of my friends and family dying and not knowing what to do with my grief, I turned to historic narratives of death." — Barbara Hammer
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1990, 16mm film, Color & B/W, Sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 19 min.
portrays a body in need of protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate.
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1989, 9:14 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
whirls around a point of centeredness as four screens of home and homelessness, travel and weather, architecture and sports signify the constant movement and haste of late twentieth century life.
1988, 18:02 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
"...In her hands, the transformation of film into a poetic and avant garde art form comes about through the direct manipulation of celluloid.” – John Hanhardt, Biennial Exhibition Catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989.
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1988, 12:21 min, B&W and color, sound
"...The 'Bad Daughters' reject obedience to the Father in favor of the impish anarchy of self-possession."
— Steve Seid, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
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1988, 33:00 min, color, sound
Three highly intellectual, highly sexual, visually playful digital works, charged with humour and political power. Hammer plays with the tools of digital processing mixing up the ‘straight love story’ by queering love and seduction through pixels gone astray.
1987, 7:36 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
Traveling mattes of the artist's torso, limbs, and extremities in Puget Sound, Yosemite and the Yucatan. Her attempt to "touch" nature is removed and blocked between figure and ground setups by the optical printer's flatness of planes.
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1987, 16mm, color and B&W, sound, 12 min.
Using a 16mm Bolex and Amiga computer, Hammer creates a witty and stunning film about how women view their sexuality versus the way male images of women and sex are perceived. The impact of technology on sexuality and emotion and the sensual self is explored through computer language juxtaposed with everyday colloquial language of sex.
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1985, 16mm film, Color/Sound by Helen Thorington, 16min.
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.
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1985, 12:39 min, color, sound
finds Barbara Hammer (wearing a mask made of subway maps) conducting gonzo interviews with subway riders on desire and sexuality.
1984, 2:44 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
The fleeting spectacle is a series of imaginative possessions, a conquest through the gaze accented by the shots fired on the video arcade game soundtrack.
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1984, 6:07, color, silent, 16 mm film on video
A film investigating the nature of spectator perception in an unfamiliar environment. Manipulating the movement of the film direction on the screen much like a camera shutter, Hammer questions the perceptual experience of mass tourism as the Bâteau Mouche endlessly circles the île de la Cité.
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1983, 16mm film, Color/Sound by Pauline Oliveros, 21 min.
A film influenced by scientists who have noted that light rays curve at the outer edges of the universe leading them to theorize that time also bends.
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1983, 11 min, b&w and color, sound, 16 mm film on video
is a celebration of ancient pre-patriarchal standing stones, mounds, and circles including Stonehenge and Avesbury.
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1983, 16 mm film, Color & B&W/Sound, 9 min.
"...Hammer replaces Vertov's sociopolitical kino-truths with adventures in domestic space."
– Claudia Gorbman, Jump Cut
1982, 15 min., color, silent, 16 mm film on video
An underwater exploration of verdant pond growth pulling the viewer into actually being the creature actively exploring.
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1982, 32:35 min, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
Barbara Hammer takes her camera out to film the audiences at screenings of her films – some women only, some mixed – at the London Film-makers' Co-op; at the Roxie Theater, in San Francisco, during Gay Pride Week (where the audience includes fellow filmmaker Curt McDowell); at The Funnel, in Toronto; and at McGill University, in Montreal.
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1981, 10:07 min, sound, 16 mm film on video
"...The film explores the tactile child nature within the adult woman filmmaker, the connection between sexuality and filmmaking, and the scientific analysis of the sense of touch." — Barbara Hammer
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1981, 6 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
"In co-making
Pools with Barbara Klutinis I wanted to bring an experiential and physiological sense of the body to the members of the audience watching the film, shot in the swimming pools designed by the first woman architect to graduate from the School of Beaux Arts in Paris, Julia Morgan..." — Barbara Hammer
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1981, 16mm film, Color/Silent, 12 min.
"...
Arequipa analogizes the building blocks of film (frames, color and black and white stocks, negative reversal, superimpositions) to the frames of architecture (doorways, windows, walls, corridors)..."
– Kathleen Hulser, Centre Pompidou Brochure, 1985
1980, 8:30 min, b&w and color, silent, Super 8mm film on video
"...With
Bamboo Xerox, I found another strategy to move my audience and break illusions... Perhaps the audience could break the illusionist ritual-or at the very least experience a different way of seeing a film." — Barbara Hammer
1979, 20 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
A film made for performance on a 360 degree rotary projection table. A woman breaks through confining architectural space, the limited space of a film frame, and the boundaries of a movie screen.
1979, 10:58 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
A 70-year-old lesbian feminist, seeing little change in the society after years of work, sends out her 40-year-old self on a journey taking her around the perimeters of the San Francisco Bay.
1978, 14:38 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
"A poetic study of the stages of a lesbian relationship by two women performance artists from honeymoon, through struggle, to break-up, to enduring friendship. Starring Terry Sendgraff on trapeze." — Barbara Hammer
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1978, 16mm film, Color/Sound, 10 min.
Matriarchal symbols of wholeness appear everywhere in nature, evoked by a goddess figure.
1976, 22:39 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
A series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker's friends and lovers intercut with a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature. Culminating footage evokes a tantric painting of sexuality sustained.
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1976, 16mm film, Color/Sound, 15 min. Made with Gloria Churchman.
In California a young woman artist/filmmaker is led by an older female artist through the small pine forests of Mendocino and the hot desert sands of Death Valley before she is taught the lesson of creative inspiration.
1975, 16mm film, Color/Sound 9 min.
A documentary on the pioneer woman, her wisdom, philosophy and common sense: Jane Brakhage as herself is the viewpoint rather than Jane Brakhage, wife of the filmmaker, Stan Brakhage.
1975, 6:05 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
"The sub-personalities of me, as baby, athlete, witch and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and color layers coming together through the powers of film." — Barbara Hammer
1975, 16mm film, Color/Sound, 8 min.
A profound and powerful experimental, personal film of one woman's despair, rage and exhibitionism; a baroque fugue of identity chanting growing from women's pain to a holistic, self-healing naming ritual.
1975, 17:34 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
"...
Superdyke...runs from mellow nature-loving to savvy urban pop, showing the thematic range of its author and the multiplicity of lesbian experience." — Juan Antonio Suarez
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1974, 16mm film, Color/Sound, 4 min.
“Hammer’s films of the ’70s are the first made by an openly lesbian American filmmaker to explore lesbian identity, desire and sexuality though avant-garde strategies. Merging the physicality of the female body with that of the film medium, Hammer’s films remain memorable for their pioneering articulation of a lesbian aesthetic.”
-Jenni Sorkin, WACK! Art & The Feminist Revolution
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1974, 3:15 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation, in which 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.
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1974, 16mm, color/Sound, 8 min.
An autumnal celebration of colorful fall leaves, brooks and bathing, chanting circles and tree goddess rites.
1973, 8:25 min, b&w and color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
Combining perhaps the only footage from the first Women’s International Day march in San Francisco and rare footage of the second National Lesbian Conference at UCLA,
Sisters! is a joyous and vital landmark in feminist, queer, and lesbian filmmaking.
1969, 3:09 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video
""
Death of a Marriage I think is my first psychodrama – finding images and filmic methods of portraying my interior emotional being..." — Barbara Hammer
1969, 7:43 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video
Abstractions of light, hand shaped mattes, radical exposure changes and the subjective body of the filmmaker mark this early film of Hammer with filmic language that reappears in her later work.
1969, 3:15 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video
"Aldebaran is the brightest star of the Taurus constellation. It is not without hubris that I claimed that light-seeing eye for myself..." — Barbara Hammer
1969, 5:19 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video
On a trip in anticipation of an around the world motor scooter tour in 1973, Hammer and her ex-husband traverse the Mendocino coast on their motorcycle – Hammer filming all the while from the rear seat. Light reflections, creative camera perspectives, and Hammer's signature self-inclusion mark this early film.
1968, 4:08 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video
"Aerial views of Los Angeles rooftops and a swimming pool surrounded by tan sunbathers contrast starkly with the Wheeler Ranch, hippie free land of shacks and barren landscape in Sonoma County..." — Barbara Hammer
1968, 3:42 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video
"
Contribution to Light is all about my excitement and thrill at seeing reflected and refracted light. I shot the edges of pieces of found broken glass that streamed light rays broken into myriad colors. I saw, years later, a shared aesthetic in Stan Brakhage’s study of a crystal ashtray." — Barbara Hammer
1968, 3:21 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on video
Her second film—created in 1968 while the artist was still married (her married name was Barbara Ward)—programmatically shows the desecration of a graveyard.
