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Psychosynthesis (1975) 16mm *
Double Strength (1978) 16mm *
Tourist (1985) 16mm
Vital Signs (1991) 16mm
Sync Touch (1981) 16mm
Available Space (1979) 16mm to Digital

Curated by: Sarah Keller * This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Barbara Hammer

May 15, 1939 – March 16, 2019

Feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema, Barbara Hammer made over 90 moving image works as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages and drawings.

Psychosynthesis

1975 | 8 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

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.

This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Double Strength

1978 | 15 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

A poetic study of the stages of a lesbian relationship by two women performance artists from honeymoon, through struggle, to break-up, to enduring friendship. Starring Terry Sendgraff on trapeze.

This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Tourist

1985 | 4 minutes | COLOR/B&W | SOUND | 16mm

“The slide of the image into politics finds concrete expression in the film TOURIST as the word ‘spectacle’ nestles in the Hollywood Hills like an Edward Ruscha painting.
Psychic desires of ‘tourists’ permeate the architecture of seeing. The fleeting spectacle is a series of imaginative possessions, a conquest through the gaze accented by the shots fired on the video arcade game soundtrack. The tourist ‘look’ is as ephemeral as the animation of the collage suggesting a miniaturizing and glazing of the grandiose wonders of the world.”
– Kathleen Hulser,
“Frames of Passage: Nine Recent Films of Barbara Hammer, ” Centre Pompidou, Paris Exhibition: “Film and Text” Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1988

Vital Signs

1991 | 9 minutes | COLOR/B&W | SILENT | 16mm

This film is dedicated to John Wilbert Hammer,
Curt McDowell and Vito Russo.

The film employs images and text to intertwine Western constructions of death that place death far away from home in a seldom visited cemetery with Hammer’s personal interactions with a skeleton, clips from Renais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour, text from Foucault’s Birth of a Clinic and scenes from a hospital intensive care unit.

Sync Touch

1981 | 12 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

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 analysis of the sense of touch.

Available Space

1979 | 20 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm on video

“Available Space is a film made for performance on a 360 degree rotary projection table. A woman breaks through confining architectural space, the limited space of a film frame, and the boundaries of a movie screen. Unexpected angles, corners, slants, floor and ceiling are engaged in unexpected play and projection. The film can also be shown as a single channel without live performance.”
— Barbara Hammer