Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She was a visual artist working primarily in film and video. She made over 80 moving image works in a career that spanned 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema.
Deborah Stratman brings past perspectives into the contemporary moment in a montage of unfinished film footage from artist Barbara Hammer with evocative sound, texts, and teachings from artist Maya Deren. Vever poetically draws connects between three gener ...
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In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with h ...
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We, as human beings on a small globe, united by evolutionary structure and biological DNA have a chance to come together through the experience of empathy and identification with the sensitive body. An unspoken plea for viewers to engage with compassion, t ...
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Barbara Hammer's first and only multi-channel video installation, that tackles deeply personal subjects of her life. ...
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Lesbian Whale animates early notebooks drawings made by Barbara Hammer between 1969 and 1971, with a voiceover commentary by friends and peers. The drawings and paintings seen in the film were made at a crucial turning point in Hammer's early career, both ...
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Welcome To This House, a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop, is about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full lesbian disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop's best loved homes in the U.S., Canada, ...
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Maya Deren's Sink, a 30 minute experimental film, is an evocative tribute to the mother of avantgarde American film. The film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Teiji Ito's family, Carolee Schneemann ...
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Generations is a 30 minute 16mm film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Barbara Hammer, 70 years old, hands the camera to Gina Carducci, a young queer filmmaker. Shooting during the last days of Astroland at C ...
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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. A a cancer 'thriver' rather than 'survi ...
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What do construction workers do in their well-earned breaks? How might Angelina Jolie's and Brad Pitt's relationship have ended? And what really happened between Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford during the summer of 1959? The answers to these and many othe ...
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Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties ...
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1920's Surrealist artists Claude Cahun and marcel Moore come to life in this hybrid documentary. Lesbians and step-sisters, the gender-bending artists lived and worked together all their lives. Heroic resisters to the Nazis occupying Jersey Isle during WWI ...
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On October 11, 2001, in Times Square, New York City, an ad hoc group of artists named Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War silently demonstrated for peace at a time when the nation was clamoring for war and sacrificing its own civil liberties. ...
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Hammer's 2003 film Resisting Paradise, which deals with the concept of art as a tool of political resistance, was especially fascinating to me. Hammer, who was doing a painting residency in Cassis, France, when war broke out in Kosovo, found herself questi ...
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Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement ...
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This video documentary centers 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. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homoph ...
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A montage of film clips and stills calling all lesbians to come out and celebrate who they are. In a trilogy of experimental documentaries, director Barbara Hammer rewrites history by inserting lesbians and lesbian imagery throughout educational films, new ...
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The Female Closet uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian stories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home mov ...
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"Blue Film No. 6: Love Is Where You Find It" (1998) is a found porn flick: a threesome. Hammer excises the male part, retaining the two ladies and an amusing digest of voyeuristic platitudes. ...
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Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on I ...
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Out in South Africa, 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-aparthei ...
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A minute-long, partly animated colour video that is a humorous plea for good sex, safely prophylactic though it may be. ...
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Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a mar ...
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In "Vital Signs" (1991), Barbara Hammer demonstratively transforms the horror of death into its opposite. She tenderly cares for a human skeleton, feeding it, dressing and caressing it, taking it for walks in the dark cabaret of an intimate relationship be ...
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Hammer used old x-ray footage, rearranged, colored and orchestrated through optical printing, in order to reveal hidden bodily movements and rhythms in its constant juxtaposition. ...
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'Still Point' serves as Barbara Hammer's definitive reassessment of 70's cultural feminism. She literally places side-by-side the romantic image of her companion walking and stretching under the sun in a landscape and the gritty realism of a methodical gar ...
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From the platonic cave to post-punk, the tape traces the invisible and visible references to women who love women from prehistory to contemporary times with the sarcastic sound of the '50s lesbian quartet from Seattle, the Sluts from Hell. ...
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The Peruvian Galapagos Islands feature in Hammer's film Endangered, where Blue-footed Boobies, seals and iguanas are equated with the filmmaker herself who identifies light, life and the genre of experimental film to be threatened with extinction in this l ...
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A whirlwind tour of paternal institutions: fatherhood, Lacanian psychoanalysis and bondage. ...
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NO NO NOOKY TV posits sexuality to be a social construct in a "sex-text" of satiric graphic representation of "dirty pictures." Made on an Amiga Computer and shot in 16mm film, NO NO NOOKY TV confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electro ...
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Place Mattes explores the space between reaching and touching. Animation and optical printing are used to create travelling mattes for places, confounding the difference between eternal and internal. ...
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Deconstructs the representation of AIDS in the popular media where distortion and misrepresentation amount to a "snow job" promoting increased homophobia, sexual discrimination and repression of gays. ...
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In Tourist, Barbara Hammer depicts a trip to Europe: the flow of images is manipulated with a syncopated rhythm, to alter the perception of places that appear well-known and to instill a feeling of anxiety ... ...
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"Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve is 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 ...
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An investigation into what subway passengers are reading. ...
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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 ...
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"Rapid montage shows a plethora of objects all arranged in, or with reference to, the central prop of a dollhouse. We see whimsical references to domesticity (kitchen implements), clothing (shoes), the housing situation (want ads), feminist film (Annette K ...
Watch NowOne-point perspective visual path across the US beginning inside a linear accelerator or atom-smashing device and traveling to such high-energy locations as the home of an ancient sun calendar in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; the site of Ohio Valley Mound cult ...
Watch NowIn Stone Circles, Hammer really leaves 'nation' as well as 'era' and creates a film poem on the prehistoric stone cultures of Britain. ...
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"Behind my desire to 'activate' the audience is a distaste for sutured, hegemonic cinema. By this, I mean a cinema dominated by both narrative and documentary traditions, cinema that hypnotizes its audience through invisible editing, illusionist sound, and ...
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An experimental movie where the viewpoint starts in a placid pond high inland, and follows the flow of water down to the sea. The movie experiments with viewing both the air, the water, and the surface of the water at the same time. The tempo changes from ...
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Barbara Hammer's Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director's prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer's work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the ea ...
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A lesbian/feminist aesthetic proposing the connection between touch and sight to be the basis for a new cinema. The film explores the tactile child nature within the adult woman filmmaker, the connection between sexuality and filmmaking, and the scientific ...
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A short documentary about the First National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which took place on Sunday, October 14th 1979. ...
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Made with Barbara Klutinis. Shot with an underwater camera exploring the swimming pools of the Hearst Castle, California. ...
Watch Now"Both NEW YORK LOFT and DOLL HOUSE convey a strong sense of resourcefulness, this 'making something' out of interiors, specifically domestic spaces. And domestic they are, in an avant-garde sort of way. The filmmaker gives plentiful evidence of arranging t ...
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Animation of photos and paper cut outs from a hike at Machu Pichu in Peru. ...
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"Shot in the Peruvian convent of Santa Catalina, 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). The confin ...
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"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. During her quest she encounters aspects of her personality: the ...
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Using the sixth century B.C. lyricist's poetry, a group of women unwrap the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life. Made by Barbara and six students, together at the Women's Building in Los Angeles. ...
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Four stages of a lesbian relationship explored in an experimental film starring performance artists Terry Sendgraff and Barbara Hammer on suspended trapezes and ropes. ...
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A child, two youths, a mother and three crones spin spirals, joining rituals of birth, death and rebirth. Filmed in Mendocino, California, where the water snake appeared on each shooting day, where the river flooded the sand spiral, where earth, air, fire ...
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A hand plays with a vagina as the same scene drifts over a sea of erotic rock formations. ...
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From the first kiss to breakup, Almy and Hammer record their relationship on a reel-to-reel ¾" tape recorder and microphone. Winner of the Louise Riskin Prize at the 1976 San Francisco Art Festival. ...
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A series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker's friends and lovers intercut with a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature. ...
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A comedy about a troop of shield-bearing Amazons who take over city institutions before relaxing in the country. "Superdyke" takes women into the streets when Barbara arms of a platoon of vagina warriors with Amazon shields in an attempt to overthrow San F ...
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"I picked up Stan and Jane Brakhage at the airport and drove them to San Francisco State College where Stan spoke about his films to the student body. I was fascinated with Jane. She was so interested in the world around her while Stan seemed caught up onl ...
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"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. ...
Watch NowAn autumnal celebration of colorful fall leaves, brooks and bathing, chanting circles and tree goddess rites. Shot on witch's land in Northern California, it is a woman celebrating woman and nature film with the poetry of Elsa Gidlow accompanying. ...
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Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its explora ...
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A celebration and collage of lesbians, including footage of the Women's International Day march in SF and joyous dancing from the last night of the second Lesbian Conference where Family of Woman played; as well as images of women doing all types of tradit ...
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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. ...
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A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation where 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 fin ...
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One of the first 3 16 mm films made by Barbara Hammer. The filmmaker changes from a damsel in gown and crown to a leather jacket motorcycle dyke. ...
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Regarding this film and Cleansed: "These are two of the first films Hammer ever made and two of the last films she made while married to a man. Never before screened, they capture Hammer and her former husband interacting together but separately – walkin ...
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1969, transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 7:34 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP ...
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Barbara Hammer (then married and known as Barbara Ward) stakes a claim to immortality. ...
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transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 3:42 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP ...
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Transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 4:08 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP ...
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1968/69, transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 5:19 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP ...
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It shows a family where the son makes a wish to switch sizes with the father so that he can be the boss for a change. The father doesn't like this at all. After a while, the son slowly realizes that being a grownup isn't all that easy. Unfortunately, the f ...
Watch NowDeborah Stratman brings past perspectives into the contemporary moment in a montage of unfinished film footage from artist Barbara Hammer with evocative sound, texts, and teachings from artist Maya Deren. Vever poetically draws connects between three gener ...
Watch NowIn 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with h ...
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Queer Genius is a cinematic exploration of four visionary queer artists breaking down barriers in their creative fields as they confront fame, failure, censorship, family, gender, and sexuality. The film embraces the communal possibilities of "genius" from ...
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Filmmaker Alyssa Bolsey stumbles on a treasure trove of vintage cameras, old film reels, fading photos, technical drawings and boxes of documents that belonged to her great-grandfather Jacques Bolsey. Among the many boxes, she spots an old movie camera wit ...
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The film examines the ways that women directors have contributed to this genre and emphasizes the role that the media play in representation of sexuality and gender, underscoring the power that film has to shape our perceptions of one another. Visually, th ...
Watch NowWe, as human beings on a small globe, united by evolutionary structure and biological DNA have a chance to come together through the experience of empathy and identification with the sensitive body. An unspoken plea for viewers to engage with compassion, t ...
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From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. ...
Watch NowWhat do filmmakers as disparate as Kevin Smith, Ed Burns, Rob Epstein, and Barbara Hammer have in common? A secret weapon known as Bob Hawk. As a veteran of the American independent film scene since its inception, the cinephile and consultant has been a r ...
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Masculinity/Femininity is an experimental film project interrogating normative notions of gender, sexuality and performance. Shot primarily on Super 8, the project merges academic and creative critique -- a document of gender de-construction rather than a ...
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Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rare, historical film and video footage, this feature documentary reveals how art addressing political consequences of discrimination and violence, the Feminist Art Revolution radically transformed the art ...
Watch NowGenerations is a 30 minute 16mm film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Barbara Hammer, 70 years old, hands the camera to Gina Carducci, a young queer filmmaker. Shooting during the last days of Astroland at C ...
Watch NowThe 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. A a cancer 'thriver' rather than 'survi ...
Watch NowJeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus, to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. The divers are in their sixties ...
Watch NowHammer's 2003 film Resisting Paradise, which deals with the concept of art as a tool of political resistance, was especially fascinating to me. Hammer, who was doing a painting residency in Cassis, France, when war broke out in Kosovo, found herself questi ...
Watch NowThis video documentary centers 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. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homoph ...
Watch NowDocumentary that highlights 18 women and covers a period of time from the 50's to the 90's. The women chosen were selected because they represent the real diversity within both feminism and independent film and video. They range in age from 65 to 25. They ...
Watch NowChildhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on I ...
Watch NowEssay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a mar ...
Watch NowBarbara Hammer's Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director's prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer's work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the ea ...
Watch NowFour stages of a lesbian relationship explored in an experimental film starring performance artists Terry Sendgraff and Barbara Hammer on suspended trapezes and ropes. ...
Watch NowFrom the first kiss to breakup, Almy and Hammer record their relationship on a reel-to-reel ¾" tape recorder and microphone. Winner of the Louise Riskin Prize at the 1976 San Francisco Art Festival. ...
Watch NowBorn in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its explora ...
Watch NowA 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. ...
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