Barbara Hammer: Through the Lens of Lynne Sachs
Provincetown Magazine
June 8, 2022
by Rebecca M. Alvin
https://provincetownmagazine.com/index.php/2022/06/08/barbara-hammer-through-the-lens-of-lynne-sachs/

When filmmaker Barbara Hammer died from complications of ovarian cancer in 2019, the film world lost one of the most innovative filmmakers of its avant garde. In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Hammer had created an outstanding body of work, ranging from scores of experimental shorts, including Multiple Orgasms (1976), which was chosen to be preserved by the National Film Preservation Foundation with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation, to the extraordinary Nitrate Kisses, a documentary about the hidden lives and legacies of lesbians that went on to win numerous accolades and is considered a landmark masterpiece of queer cinema, a first of its kind. Her work is at once provocative, playful, sensual, and formally inventive.

Although 10 years younger than Hammer, experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs hit her professional stride in the same circles with her in San Francisco in the 1980s, and the two developed a unique friendship that spanned several decades. Sachs, herself an innovator in creative nonfiction filmmaking, took a workshop taught by Hammer about optical printing, a process for creating special effects through specialized processing and techniques in celluloid film. Likewise, Hammer studied sound recording with Sachs. Both conceptually and practically, they were working in an alternative film universe compared with the mainstream, male-dominated one. Each of them operated like a one-woman band: filming, recording sound, editing, performing, directing, etc. each on her own, making deeply personal films that addressed larger societal issues from individual perspectives.

In that environment at that particular time, Sachs says, “The word documentary was not assumed to be a sort of template for an educational film or a diatribe on a political thesis, but it was a place to explore the subjectivity of reality. And that’s what drew us into working with issues that matter to us. Whether we were looking into issues around race or age, at the time we were doing it from our subjective place. We were both making films that refracted and played with the reality we were observing.”

As each woman’s career in cinema expanded, they maintained a creative connection, with talk of collaboration going back many years. But as Hammer was preparing to die, having lived with ovarian cancer for several years, she asked four filmmakers to complete films she had in the works. One of those filmmakers was Sachs, whom Hammer asked to complete a film from footage, sound, and journal entries created here in Provincetown while staying in one of the famed dune shacks in 1998. Sachs agreed and the resulting 14-minute film, A Month of Single Frames (2019), will be shown at AMP Gallery as part of a month-long celebration of Hammer’s life, work, and legacy, along with Sachs’ 2018 documentary about Hammer and two other filmmakers (Carolee Schneeman and Gunvor Nelson) called Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor, and one by Brydie O’Connor called Love, Barbara.

A Month of Single Frames is an extraordinarily beautiful meditation that combines sound and image from the 1998 dune shack stay with present-day recordings of Hammer reading from her journal and poetic on-screen text Sachs wrote. The process is transparent, with Sachs and Hammer discussing what to record as they record it, bringing us back to that idea of documentary as a construction and not mere “reality.” Closeups of a dragonfly, beach grass swaying in the breeze, stop-motion animation with snail shells are enveloped in the sounds of nighttime insect choirs, waves, and creaky floorboards. Hammer’s sense of wonder, what she describes as being “overwhelmed by the simplicity” comes through bright and clear through colored gel flag shadows in the sand with her narration describing the cinematic experimentation that continued throughout her life. Sachs weaves these elements together to create a portrait of an incredible film artist who, like many before her, found inspiration here in the ecology of the dunes.

While Hammer’s body of work is centered on female sexuality quite specifically, and Sachs often weaves in elements of her family history, (sometimes focusing entirely on it, such as in the film Film About a Father Who… about the complexity of her father and his problematic relationships), the two filmmakers share a feminist approach and an interest in film as language; they worked with its formal qualities, experimenting with techniques and devices unique to cinema, and they both imbue their films with the personal and specific, often in a documentary context. In an age where documentaries have become extremely popular but also extremely narrow in their formal conventions, there is often a misunderstanding of just how diverse documentary as a form is. Both fiction and documentary films convey truth, opinion, and fabrication by virtue of being creative works, and there is a long history of hybridity that distinguishes documentary from journalism. This doesn’t only include experimental artists like Sachs and Hammer, but also more mainstream documentarians like Werner Herzog and Agnes Varda whose works never attempt to hide the personal lens through which the subject matter is seen.

“It’s a vessel for thinking about how reality works and doesn’t work sometimes… It’s separate from journalists. We actually not only deal with reality, we also ask how that can become a truth, or it becomes a subjective hypothesis. It always comes with a subjectivity that’s, I think, really important—that who sees the reality is as important as what is seen. And so when we say, ‘through the lens,’ it’s, you know, through the lens of a woman or through the lens of a gay person or a Black person, and it shapes your experience of that reality,” explains Sachs.

But also, she says the process is about discovery as you go. “To engage with reality is also the possibility for play and a kind of dance with what you observe and how you then share it with your audience. I think Barbara taught us that. She loved to play with her materials. That was like her touch, and that’s where she found surprises and found out more about herself. I think in documentary you also have a chance for introspection which to me is really important.”

Barbara Hammer’s films, drawings, and other works are on view at AMP Gallery, 432 Commercial St., Provincetown, along with the films by Lynne Sachs and Brydie O’Connor through June 22. For more information call 646.298.9258 or visit artmarketprovincetown.com.

This Week’s Films at AMP Gallery
Films by Barbara Hammer

June 9 Place Mattes: 1987, 7:36 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video.

June 11 Contribution to Light: 1968, 3:42 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video.

June 12 Multiple Orgasm: 1976, 5:32 min, color, silent, 16 mm film on HD video.

June 13 Dream Age: 1979, 10:58 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video.

June 14 Pond and Waterfall: 1982, 15 min., color, silent, 16 mm film on video.

Film by Brydie O’Connor

June 8 & June 15 – 16  Love, Barbara (documentary; 15 min.)

Films by Lynne Sachs

June 10 & June 17 – 18  A Month of Single Frames (Made with and for Barbara Hammer; 14 min. color sound 2019)

NOTE: Films continue through late June. Visit artmarketprovincetown.com/happenings for a complete schedule.

Opening reception: Friday, May 27, 6-9 PM | Barbara Hammer, Brydie O’Connor and Lynne Sach’s film schedule will be posted during the exhibition in “Happenings”.
Art Market Provincetown
http://www.artmarketprovincetown.com/art/20220527/

Barbara Hammer | Selected Films, Photographs, Drawings & Collages, along with Films by Brydie O’ Connor & Lynne Sachs

Many thanks to Florrie Burke and Louky Keijsers Koning for their support and collaboration on this exhibtion of Barbara Hammer’s works.

All works are Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Company gallery, New York.

Barbara Hammer often said that she had three great loves- art, nature and me. Her time in the dune shack was thrilling for her and she would be gratified that her work has come full circle to land here at AMP in Provincetown. The natural beauty of the Cape has inspired so many-Hammer among them. She loved its’ winds, sand and waves. It is fitting that the waters off Provincetown are her final resting place as she swims with the whales. — Florrie Burke

Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), known for her groundbreaking films that celebrated female sexuality began filming in the 1970s, the decade she called “that glorious time of feminist ideals and lesbian bed-hopping.” It was also the time, after a yearlong trip around the world on a motor scooter, that she decided to be an artist. She enrolled in a painting course taught by abstract expressionist William Morehouse, who saw such movement in Hammer’s paintings that he encouraged her to experiment with film. It was the start of her new life: as filmmaker, single woman, and lesbian—a word she’d never heard until the age of 30.

“When I made love with a woman for the first time my entire worldview shifted,” Hammer said. “In addition to the sensual pleasures, my social network completely changed; I was swept up with the energies and dreams of a feminist revolution.” Hammer made 29 films in the 1970s, many of which reflected her exploration of sex and identity, like Multiple Orgasm, 1976 and Dream Age from 1979.

Hammer’s artistic output wasn’t limited to film only, she took her sketchbooks and photo camera everywhere she went, which resulted in intimate drawing as well as playful and performative photographs, like the BH Gestallt series, which will be on view among a selection of drawings.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the time of Reagan, AIDS, and heightened LGBT activism, Hammer’s films blended feminist politics, lesbian erotica, and social comment. No No Nooky TV (1987), one of the films on display confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface.

In the 2000s Barbara Hammer’s output slowed down, as she focused on feature films. However, in the last 13 years of her life she published an autobiography, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life and created 7 new films as well as a digital rendering of a selection of her sketchbook drawings, titled Lesbian Whale (2015).

Hammer’s work is held in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne. Her complete catalogue of 16 and 8mm film, as well as Super 8, is in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles, and her papers are available for review at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven.

During her lifetime she created two awards for lesbian and queer filmmakers, and had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York mounted a retrospective of her film, photography, drawings, and sculpture, which New York Times art critic Holland Cotter named one of the best exhibitions of that year.

(The above text is based on a text written by Andrew Durbin and Susan Champlin)

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Brydie O’ Connor | Documentary film: Love, Barbara

Love, Barbara is short (15 min.) documentary about the iconic legacy of pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, through the lens and love of her partner of over 30 years, Florrie Burke.

Brydie O’Conner is a Kansas-bred, New York based filmmaker.

Her award-winning work spans the documentary and narrative fields with a focus on women-driven and queer stories. Brydie has directed short documentaries LOVE, BARBARA (2021) which premiered at Academy Award-qualifying Santa Barbara International Film Festival and FRIENDS OF DOROTHY (2020), which premiered in New York at DOC NYC. In 2021, Brydie was selected for The Future of Film is Female Award, and she received a NYSCA grant sponsored by Women Make Movies in addition to a Brooklyn Arts Council grant. In 2019-2020, she workshopped her forthcoming film in the Female Filmmakers Berlin Directing Lab. Much of her work is inspired by archival histories.

Brydie’s producing credits include THE LESBIAN BAR PROJECT with Executive Producer Lea DeLaria, WOMONTOWN for PBS Kansas City, and she has archival produced Season 7 of THE CIRCUS on Showtime in addition to various projects on Left/Right TV’s roster. She is a graduate of The George Washington University.

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Lynne Sachs | Films: A Month of Single Frames & Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor

A Month of Single Frames (Made with and for Barbara Hammer; 14 min. color sound 2019): “In the last few months of filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s life, she asked me to come to her home to discuss something she needed to say in person. I immediately faced a complicated set of emotions. I knew that this tête-à-tête would involve some kind of good-bye, but I had no idea that she had decided to share a part of her personal archive, and thus a part of her being on this earth, with me. As I sat at her side, Barbara vividly described to me her 1998 artist residency in Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. For one month, she lived and made her art in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, made field recordings, and kept a journal. Barbara’s only instructions to me were very simple: “Do absolutely whatever you want with this material.” While writing the text for my own film, the words I placed on the screen came to me in a dream. I quickly realized that this kind of oneiric encounter could become a posthumous continuation of the dialogue I had started with Barbara. Since I would never again be able to speak to her about her life or the ontological nature of cinema or the textures of a sand dune, I would converse with her through A Month of Single Frames. Through my writing, I tried to address Barbara’s celebration of solitude and cinematic embodiment. Ultimately, my text on the screen over Barbara’s images functions as a search for a cinematic experience that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once. It is also an embrace of an ambiguous second person you who might be Barbara herself or might be anyone watching the film.”

Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital, 9 minutes, 2018): 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. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.

Lynne Sachs is an experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn. She has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems. Working from a feminist perspective, she investigates connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. She uses letters, archives, diaries, poetry and music, to take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Over the years, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel/ Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Lynne’s films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival.

AMP is a live contemporary gallery space dedicated to exhibiting multi-disciplined work by visual, conceptual, performance artists, filmmakers and writers. Exhibitions & Happenings are primarily cutting-edge, and often process-based.

2022 features Martin R. Anderson, Shez Arvedon, Midge Battelle, Susan Bernstein, Mx Justin Vivian Bond, Terry Boutelle, Linda Leslie Brown, Bobby Busnach, Karen Cappotto, Jamie Casertano, Barbara E. Cohen, Liz Collins, Anne Corrsin, Jeanne-Marie Crede, Jay Critchley, Katrina del Mar, Phyllis Ewen, Lola Flash, Kathi Robinson Frank, Barbara Hadden, Barbara Hammer, Michelle Handelman, Heather Kapplow, Jackie Lipton, Shari Kadison, Zehra Khan, David Macke, Jade McGleughlin, Zammy Migdal, Bobby Miller, Pasquale Natale, Alice O’Malley, Pat Place, Mark Rosenthal, Marian Roth, Nancy Rubens, Jicky Schnee, Lori Swartz, Christopher Tanner, Gail Thacker, Judith Trepp, Suara Welitoff, Forrest Williams, Rick Wrigley & others.

JP Art Market, AMP’s independent sister gallery created by artist Patti Hudson has long been an integral contributor to the Boston arts community showing work by emerging and established, local and international artists such as Kristen Dodge, Leslie Hall, Lisa King, Roger Miller, and Patti Smith.

AMP Gallery, 432 Commercial Street, Provincetown MA 02657 | Mail: PO Box 807

Debbie Nadolney, Gallery Director, Curator

info@artmarketprovincetown.com | 646.298.9258

Open May – October, and always by appointment.