Block 3. Barbara Hammer's Retrospective: Nitrate Kisses + Sanctus

Nitrate Kisses

In her first feature, after decades as a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Barbara Hammer weaves striking images of four contemporary gay and lesbian couples with footage of an unearthed, forbidden, and invisible history, searching eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of queer culture. Questions of historic representation are examined through addressing the margins, between-the-line readings, and images outside of prescribed textual boundaries. Archival footage from “Lot In Sodom” (1933), often regarded as the first queer film made in the United States, as well as footage from German narrative and documentary films of the thirties, are interwoven with contemporary footage in this multi-faceted, haunting documentary.

"Nitrate Kisses questions how history is recorded and encourages the viewer, gay or straight, to save scraps, letters, books, records, and snapshots in order to preserve our 'ordinary' lives as history." — Barbara Hammer

With: Sally Binford, Peter Cramer, Alistair Fate, Frances Lorraine, Julie Tolentino, Jack Waters

Sanctus

“Sanctus” is a film of rephotographed moving x-rays, originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects the hidden fragility of interior organ systems.

Writes Hammer: "In making ‘Sanctus’ I was concerned about the contradictory qualities of beauty and danger of the images that were made by radiation. I delighted in the imagery and at the same time I imagined the deleterious effects of the image making on the subjects. This was my dilemma in making the film and continues until today. I rely on the viewers' intuition of a foreboding, a sense of ambivalence, an unsteady non-homogenous emotive state, a not-knowing."