WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:00 — 81.0MB)
Barbara Hammer has been making films for over 40 years but it is highly unlikely that you’ve ever seen them and are now asking “Who”?
Born in 1939 in Hollywood, California, a kind of cosmic irony, Barbara Hammer is an American feminist filmmaker known for being one of the pioneers of lesbian film. Hammer is known for creating experimental films that we might describe in a staid way as dealing with women’s issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family. But we also might be very specific…they’re about menstruation, multiple orgasm, and masturbation, about loving and being loved, about knowing and respecting the truths of the body, about living and dying, about the lies we tell ourselves in history, art, science and our very social organization. In short, Barbara Hammer makes films to Queer the world.
Bloomington Indiana is hosting a film series called Barbara Hammer: Boundless and it explores five decades of Hammer’s work, highlighting themes of desire, feminist community, health and wellness, historical and archival research, and self-representation: a pioneering filmography of queer experimentation.
Featuring newly restored prints from The Academy Film Archive, this program pays homage to a female filmmaker who has had a profound impact on queer filmmaking and art herstory. It begins tomorrow, January 16th, and runs through Friday, tracking Hammer’s work chronologically from The Beginning, 1968 to ’78, the Middle, 1981 to ’90, and the Never Ending…which shows two of her more recent films, including Evidentiary Bodies which confronts Hammer’s living with ovarian cancer. The Screening takes place in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive Screening Room in the Herman B Wells Library.
GUESTS
The co-curators of Barbara Hammer: Boundless:
Joan Hawkins is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the IU Media School and a member of The Writers Guild at Bloomington and The Burroughs Century. She has written extensively on experimental and avant-garde cultures.
Carmel Curtis is a Film Digitization Specialist at the Moving Image Archive of the Indiana University Library and is a board member of the non-profit Screen Slate, a daily resource for independent, repertory, and gallery screenings in New York City.
RELATED
Barbara Hammer’s website
A More Daring Pleasure, on Hammer’s “Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)” in Artforum
How We Talk About Our Dying: Susan Gubar On Living with Cancer (Interchange)
MUSIC
Songs by Alix Dobkin
“Lesbian Power Authority”
“Fantasy Girl”
“Hearts & Struggles”
Sleater Kinney
“No Cities to Love”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
