Platform Arts is thrilled to host Narrm/Melbourne-based collective Artist Film Workshop for a special co-presentation of Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses (1992). Hammer’s first feature documentary, Nitrate Kisses weaves striking images of four gay and lesbian couples with archival footage from the first gay film made in the U.S.A., Lot In Sodom (1933).

“Nitrate Kisses is a landmark film in queer cinema; it was one of the first to include references to passing, coding, the history of the Village and Christopher Street in New York City, issues of lesbians and gays of colour, pulp novel culture, butch/femme, coming out, and ageism in the LGBT+ community. Such themes had often been left out of films because of the Hollywood censorship code of the 1930s.

Barbara Hammer makes the invisible visible by rescuing and inventing lost images in Nitrate Kisses. At once sexy, erotic and confrontational, Hammer’s work operates at the margins between truth and fiction, memory and history, opening up a new conceptualization of LGBT+ biography and visual history.”

– Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Senses of Cinema, July 2020

This event is presented as part of the FAIRY program, running 06 April – 17 May 2024.

Artist Film Workshop (AFW) is an artist collective and not-for-profit organisation which provides access to knowledge and resources for filmmakers and artists in Melbourne. AFW holds regular screenings and workshops for people interested in film or working with sound and vision.