Barbara Hammer (filmmaker)

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Barbara Hammer at the 2014 Art + Feminism Wikipedia Editathon

Barbara Jean Hammer (born May 15, 1939 in Hollywood , Los Angeles , California - † March 16, 2019 in Manhattan , New York City , New York ) was an American filmmaker, performance and media artist.

Life

Barbara Hammer was born in Los Angeles , California to Marian Kusz and John Wilber Hammer and grew up in Inglewood. She was familiar with the film industry from an early age, as her grandfather worked as a cook for American director David Wark Griffith . Her maternal grandparents came from Ukraine . After finishing school, she studied psychology at the University of California in Los Angeles . She graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1961. A study of English literature followed, which she finished in 1963 with a master's degree. In the early 1970s, she was also enrolled in film at San Francisco State University . There she met Maya Deren's film Meshes of the Afternoon , which inspired her to make experimental autobiographical films herself.

In 1974 Hammer was married and taught at a community college in Santa Rosa, California . It was around this time that she came out as a lesbian . She left her marriage "on a motorcycle with a Super 8 camera in her luggage", as she told Tina DiFeliciantino in an interview. In the same year she created the film Dyketactics , which is widely considered to be one of the first lesbian films in the world. She also completed her film studies with a master's degree.

From 1996 to 1997 she attended the Multi-Media Digital Studies course at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles , for which she received a post-masters certificate.

plant

Barbara Hammer is considered a pioneer of queer cinema and one of the first filmmakers to explicitly deal with the realities of lesbian life through film. She is known for numerous experimental cinematic approaches to gender roles, lesbian relationships and preoccupation with age and family.

In 2006 Barbara Hammer was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which she dealt with repeatedly in artistic works - films and performances. In 2010 she published her autobiography Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life , for which she received the Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir / Biography category in 2011 . She succumbed to the disease in March 2019.

Her estate, which includes original copies of films, prints, outtakes and other material, is managed by the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, where a project is working on the preparation of all of her cinematic work.

Awards

She has received numerous awards for the more than 80 moving image works that Barbara Hammer created in the course of her life. Her first feature-length film, the experimental documentary Nitrate Kisses, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. In the same year it was awarded the Polar Bear Award of the ILGCN (International Gay and Lesbian Network) at the time of the Teddy Awards in Berlin and as best documentary at the Festival Internacional de Cine Realizado por Mujeres in Madrid .

In 2006, she received the first-ever Shirley Clarke Avant-Garde Filmmaker Award from the New York Women in Film and Television, as well as the Women in Film Award from the St. Louis International Film Festival. In 2008 she received the Leo Award from the Flaherty Film Seminar. Her film A Horse Is Not A Metaphor won the Teddy Award for best short film in 2009 and was also runner-up at the Black Maria Film Festival in Princeton , USA.

In 2011 she also won the Teddy Award in the Best Short Film category for her films Generations and Maya Deren's Sink . The film has been shown at numerous festivals, e.g. B. at the Torino Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Punta de Vista Film Festival, the Festival de Films des Femmes Créteil, and the International Women's Film Festival Dortmund / Cologne .

In 2013, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to film Waking Up Together, about the poet Elizabeth Bishop . In the same year she was given a Marie Walsh Sharpe Artist studio seat to work on performance projections.

Sponsorship award

In 2017, the $ 5,000 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant was awarded for the first time by the nonprofit Queer Art in New York . The award was donated by Barbara Hammer. The jury consisted of Cheryl Dunye , Su Friedrich and Dani Restack (formerly: Leventhal).

Previous winners

  • 2017: Fair Brane for the short film essay Drink More Water

Filmography (selection)

  • 1973: A Gay Day
  • 1974: Dyketactics
  • 1976: Multiple orgasm
  • 1980–1987: Lesbian Humor: Collection of short films
  • 1981: Sync Touch , 16 mm film, 10 min.
  • 1981: Pools , 16 mm film, together with. Barbara Klutinis, 9 min.
  • 1981: Arequipa , 16 mm film, 12 min.
  • 1981: Pictures for Barbara , 16 mm film, 10 min.
  • 1981: The Lesbos Film , 16 mm film, 27 min.
  • 1982: Pond and Waterfall , 16 mm film, 15 min.
  • 1982: Audience , 16 mm film, 32 min.
  • 1983: Bent Time , 16 mm film, 21 min.
  • 1983: Stone Circles , 16 mm film, 7 min.
  • 1983: New York Loft , 16 mm film, 9 min.
  • 1983: See What You Hear What You See , 16 mm film, 3 min. (Installation and projection)
  • 1984: Doll House , 16 mm film, 4 min.
  • 1984: Tourist , 16 mm film, 3 min.
  • 1984: Parisian Blinds , 16 mm film, 6 min.
  • 1984: Pearl Diver , 16 mm film, 6 min.
  • 1985: Optic Nerve , 16 mm film, in collaboration with Helen Thorington, 16 min.
  • 1985: Hot Flash , video, 17 min.
  • 1985: Would You Like To Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape , video, 13 min. (Film about installation / performance)
  • 1986: Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of Aids , video, 9 min.
  • 1987: Place Mattes , 16 mm film, 9 min.
  • 1987: No No Nooky TV , 16 mm film, 12 min.
  • 1988: History of the World According to a Lesbian , Video, 22 min.
  • 1988: Endangered , 16 mm film, 19 min.
  • 1988: Two Bad Daughters , video, 12 min.
  • 1988: TV Tart , video, 12 min. (Performance & film)
  • 1988: Bedtime Stories, I, II, III , video, 33 min.
  • 1989: Still Point , 16 mm film, 9 min.
  • 1990: Sanctus , 16 mm film, in collaboration with Neil B. Rolnick, 19 min.
  • 1991: Vital Signs , 16 mm film, 9 min.
  • 1991: Dr. Watson's X-Rays , video, 22 min.
  • 1992: Nitrate Kisses , 16 mm film, 67 min.
  • 1993: Shirley Temple and Me , video, 3 min.
  • 1993: Save Sex , video, 1 min.
  • 1994: Out in South Africa , video, 51 min.
  • 1995: Tender Fictions , 16 mm film, 58 min.
  • 1998: Blue Film No. 6: Love Is Where You Find It , 8 mm film, 3 min.
  • 1998: The Female Closet , video, 58 min.
  • 2000: Devotion. A film about Ogawa Productions , video, 84 min.
  • 2000: History Lessons , 16 mm film, 66 min.
  • 2001: My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities , video, 53 min.
  • 2003: Resisting Paradise , 16 mm film, 80 min.
  • 2006: Lover / Other , video, 55 min.
  • 2007: Fucking Different New York (segment "Villa Serbolloni")
  • 2007: Diving Women of Jeju-do , video, 30 min.
  • 2008: A Horse Is Not A Metaphor , in collaboration with Meredith Monk , DVD, 30 min.
  • 2010: Generations , together with Gina Carducci, 16 mm film, 30 min.
  • 2011: Maya Deren's Sink , HD video, 30 min.
  • 2015: Welcome To This House , HD Video, 79 min.

Performances

  • 1978: The Great Goddess
  • 1982: Be Mine Valentine
  • Bent Time, 1983 *
  • Available space
  • Changing the Shape of Film
  • The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)

Installations

  • Sea Change (a poetics of the liquid state)
  • 2010: Synopsis
  • 4 screen clip
  • Stills
  • Lesbians in cyberspace
  • 1994: 8 in 8 , New World Disorder Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

Web links

Commons : Barbara Hammer  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. Richard Sandomir: Barbara Hammer, Filmmaker of Lesbian Sexuality, Dies at 79. In: The New York Times , March 20, 2019. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  2. Extensive obituary in: Maximilíano Durón and Alex Greenberger: Barbara Hammer, Pioneering Queer Experimental Filmmaker, Dead at 79. In: artnews.com. March 16, 2019, accessed March 18, 2019 .
  3. a b Tina DiFeliciantino: Barbara Hammer. In: Bomb Magazine. April 1, 1993, accessed April 6, 2019 .
  4. ^ Jarrett Earnest: Time is an Emotional Muscle. Barbara Hammer with Jarrett Earnest. In: brooklynrail.org. December 10, 2012, accessed April 6, 2019 .
  5. ^ Sally Berger: Maya Deren's Legacy . In: Connie Butler, Alexandra Schwartz et al. (Eds.): Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art . Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-87070-771-1 , pp. 309 .
  6. ^ Greg Youmans: Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer's Films of the 1970s. In: headlands.org. Headlands Center for the Arts, January 1, 2016, accessed April 7, 2019 .
  7. Barbara Hammer: HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life . The Feminist Press at CUNY, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-55861-612-7 .
  8. Jenn Reese: 23rd Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists and Winners. In: Lambda Literary. March 15, 2012, accessed March 27, 2019 .
  9. Nadine Lange: The pursuit of visibility. In: tagesspiegel.de. March 17, 2019, accessed March 19, 2019 .
  10. Note on the website of the Academy Film Archive
  11. Nitrate Kisses. In: berlinale.de. 2016, accessed April 7, 2019 .
  12. Maximiliano Durón: Queer Art Names Inaugural Recipient of Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant. In: artnews.com. December 5, 2017, accessed April 13, 2019 .