Liberally employing a mixture of innocent, picturesque, risqué, and explicit images in numerous cinematic techniques, History Lessons charts a new history of lesbian identity from the 19th century to the present. Hammer reimagines and recreates history and visual culture in ways both playful and profound as she maps a lesbian consciousness across our collective visual experience.

Preceding History Lessons will be our series’ namesake film, Available Space, as well as one of Hammer’s final works, a collaborative project produced with filmmaker Matt Wolf that revisits a location from her own History Lessons and examines the loss of a key locus of lesbian life in New York City now erased by the sweeping force of gentrification.

Programmed and notes by UCLA Film & Television Archive Film Programmer K.J. Relth-Miller and Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano

This program contains some explicit adult content.

Available Space
Director: Barbara Hammer.
1978. 10 min. USA. Color. 16mm.
Premiere of new restoration by the Academy Film Archive.

History Lessons Redo: The Meat Market
(excerpt)
Directors: Barbara Hammer, Matt Wolf
2019. 9.5 min. USA. Color. English. Digital.
Courtesy of Matt Wolf and Florrie Burke.

History Lessons
Director: Barbara Hammer.
2000. 65 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm.
Premiere of new restoration by the Academy Film Archive.

All film screenings of Available Space: Explorations in Experimental Film are available here.