Block 2. Barbara Hammer's Retrospective: Lover/Other + Women I Love
This retrospective of the queer and feminist cinema pioneer, icon, and activist Barbara Hammer covers her work ranging from the early 1970s – when the director brought the body and the lesbian nude to the screen, creating truly subversive art for that time – to her most recent films made in the 21st century. Barbara Hammer's films are the result of an experimental search for tools to challenge stereotypes about gender roles, lesbian identity, and sexuality and expose the historical exclusion of non-heteronormative people from public space. Her work features bold erotica used as a political tool in the fight for equality. Suitable for adult audiences only.
Lover/Other
1920s Surrealist artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore come to life in this hybrid documentary. Lesbians and step-sisters, the gender-bending artists lived and worked together all their lives. Heroic resisters to the Nazis occupying Jersey Isle during WWII, they were captured and sentenced to death. Hammer infuses this film with vigor, using photographs, archival footage, dramatic interludes of a "found Cahun script," and unique interviews with Jersey Isle residents who knew the "sisters."
Women I Love
The film is a series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker's friends and lovers intercut with a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature. Culminating footage evokes a tantric painting of sexuality sustained.
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Lover/Otherdir. Barbara Hammer, /USA, France/2006/55 min.
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Women I Lovedir. Barbara Hammer, /USA/1976/23 min.
