Block 4. Barbara Hammer's Retrospective: Tender fictions + Evidentiary Bodies

Tender Fictions

Hammer’s 1996 autobiographical documentary “Tender Fictions” is the second in a trilogy “Invisible Histories” that includes the iconic “Nitrate Kisses” and “History Lessons”. The film was chosen for the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, for which Lisanne Skyler wrote, “Barbara Hammer’s struggle becomes symbolic of all those who have rejected the ideals by which they were raised... a moving and provocative look at the role of community in an artist’s life and the role of the artist in her community."

“The fluidity of gender in my community intrigued me too. How could biography be fixed if gender, sexuality and all the counterparts of costume, gesture, behavior and sexual practice were fluid? In ‘Tender Fictions’ I was both Barbara Hammer and Bob Hammer, the pronouns changed from ‘her’ to ‘him’ to ‘I.’ Fantasy and ‘truth’ comingled and performance was self-construction. Power relations changed too as I gave the audience the power to make meaning. They could construct sense and decipher ‘truths’ and ‘fictions’ in “Tender Fictions” just like they determined chronology while watching “Nitrate Kisses”.” – says Barbara Hammer in the book “Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life” (2010).

Evidentiary Bodies

An audience immersed in three screens to feel the encasement of illness, the isolation of the material body. The forever ongoing chain of film runs but cannot hold up the protagonist. Time is flexible as the body transforms and the film loops. A trilogy of the self, witness of decline and suffering, performing the unthinkable, inevitable, dance of death. Three surrounds, enfolds, embraces the one who cannot stand alone.

We, as human beings on a small globe, united by evolutionary structure and biological DNA have a chance to come together through the experience of empathy and identification with the sensitive body. An unspoken plea for viewers to engage with compassion, to experience vulnerability, to know through evidence this body is their body.

"I still long for that most intimate of sharing and although I can't crawl inside my lover's skin and experience her from the inside out, I can practice an empathetic listening, repeating back what I have heard and learned, sympathetically embracing 'otherness' and difference. Through this 'domestic' practice I extend these tools to the audience through performance in film. This places the work and the viewer in a new relationship in which the spatial field of the screen is expanded through exhalation and collapsed through inhalation. The work is experienced and perceived through the performer’s body as we breathe together remembering that cancer is not a 'battle,' cancer is a disease. There are aberrant cells not 'deadly foes.' She is not 'combative' and 'brave,' she is living with cancer. She is not going to win or lose her 'battle.' She is not a 'survivor,' she is living with cancer. There is not a 'war' on cancer; there is concentrated research.

This could be empathy." — Barbara Hammer