Barbara Hammer!
Photo: Barbara Hammer
Here is the link to the video: Barbara Hammer Media Maven Master Class @ Banff Centre
Here is the link to the CSIF Answer Print article: http://issuu.com/csif_calgaryfilm/docs/oct2011_nospreads
Click here to buy Barbara Hammer’s book: Hammer! Making Movie Out of Sex and Life
“I would like to be considered a poet of images…I am a visual poet, a poet of vision, a visionary.” –Barbara Hammer (From her new book: HAMMER!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, The Feminist Press, NYC, 2010)
Barabara Hammeris one of the most, if not the most important queer and feminist filmmaker of our time. Hammer has been concerned with creating, documenting and correcting history of queer film, specially but not limited to Lesbian films, since the 1970’s. Her found footage spans the 20th Century and creates a new visual refection of the past.
I drove up to Banff on Friday night from Calgary, and for the first time in my life, arrived at the Banff Centre. I had heard of this place many times in passing from other artists, but did not realize how wonderful it actually was until I arrived there.
Before the screening of her films, Hammer came out center stage and read the prologue to her book (HAMMER!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life) and then introduced the first film, Barbara Ward Will Never Die, a film Hammer made right out of film school while married to her husband at the time, hence the last name “Ward”. Barbara Ward Will Never Die, was made on Super 8 film, was shifty and out of focus, moving through trees. Hammer explained after this film that these were not emotionally preconceived images. The camera just documented movement of Hammer through the cemetery knocking down tombstones, her being in control of the film. This film was Hammer’s marriage of feeling and images.
Optic Nerve (16 mm, 1985) was first film of Hammer’s that I ever saw, in my experimental film class in 2009, and the second in her screening. I remember my first time seeing this film I felt that it was dark in emotion but also had some light-hearted humor through the non-digetic sound used through out. The images of the woman (who I now know was Hammer’s grandmother), being pushed throughout a sterile environment is a very grainy decomposing image, almost to the point of being abstracted in certain parts. The degradation of the image is very symbolic of the degradation of life and how we all decompose the same way in the end. Vanishing into nothingness that cannot be recognizable in the end. The sounds are very mechanical which I think cut down on the emotion in this film. The film has strong minimalist soundtrack, which carries a strong rhythm with a base drum and the advancing video equipment, which guides the film. Hammer’s explanation of the film brought forth the heaviness of the subject matter, which I would have not understood otherwise. The lady being pushed around in the film Optic Nerve was Hammer’s grandmother. She was visiting her at her nursing home while filming.
Sanctus, a 16 mm film made in 1990 with found footage discovered by Hammer in the home of George Eastman in Rochester, New York. Like Optic Nerve and Barbara Ward will never die, Sanctus deals with Mortality. The images are from nitrate X-Ray film that contained both male and female subjects performing activities such as eating, drinking or playing musical instruments. There were also a few animals in the film, including a rabbit, a snake, and a lizard. There were positive and negative images used flickering through like optic nerve and scratches, drawing on the film. The classical compositions that were instrumental and choral contributed largely to a very different mood in this film. It felt more retro and yet more contemporary than the previous films made by Hammer. There was still a lot of repetition and overlapping/super imposition in this film, however the musical arrangement in unison with the moving images became almost like choreographed dance numbers and less loose in approach than her previous films. Hammer explained that all the doctors who were in the found footage in Sanctus died of Cancer due to the radiation exposure of the x-ray machine used to record on the nitrate film.
The last film Hammer showed was a recent film made on video in 2008 entitled A Horse is Not a Metaphor. This film really caught me off guard because I did not expect it to quite as literal or real and raw as it turned out to be. The film documents Hammer’s stage 3 ovarian cancer chemotherapy treatments in “rounds” as a metaphor for a rodeo. This film was very connected to nature and relationship between animals, nature and their environment. There were many super impositions of horses on Hammer and visa versa. The close-ups were sometimes so close that the images were unrecognizable and made a very recognizable connection between Hammer and the horses (whether their hair or their eyes next to her own). The horses in the film also over came different cancers.
This film really took me by surprise, the same way, if someone had told me they survived a shark attack. It was so intimate and raw in the powerful images and use of the footage, unlike any of the other films that felt very secret and removed. Perhaps that comes with the age/experience that allows for that level of in confidence in your artistic medium. There are very few experiences I have absorbed quite the same way as A Horse is Not a Metaphor. It had a lot to do with the previous film and the experience as a whole of having Hammer read from her book to open and close the films, followed by a Q&A session.
Saturday was the Media Maven Masterclass with Hammer. We started the day with a meditation session of imagined visualization into our own bodies, followed by a visual script we constructed on a life-sized outline of our bodies. These drawings/collages became the script for our own experimental films, based on the body parts we were assigned or had chose. Mine happened to be the pelvis, I chose this because it was the most colorful part of my drawing and as a woman, I identify with the power of creation, which allows me to produce another human life that was housed by my pelvis. Personally it feels like the most powerful part of my female body and so I visualized how I wanted my film to appear based on these feelings. Our master class was essentially ten women who all had very strong creative energy flowing and I wanted to try and channel the feeling that gave me as an artist into a film. Working with Hammer on our projects was an amazing experience. She has such a calming and happy presence to her being. It is very nurturing to the creation of the experimental film we were creating.
“For woman artists everywhere
May your pleasures in creating be huge;
Your path sound; your fears, vanished;
Your success valued.
Yours is the future I write for.”
–Barbara Hammer (From her new book: HAMMER!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, The Feminist Press, NYC, 2010)
Photo: Barbara Hammer and Me
