Occupation film director Website barbarahammer.com | Name Barbara Hammer Role Filmmaker | |
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Movies Nitrate Kisses, Tender Fictions, History Lessons, American Stag, Dyketactics Similar People Maya Deren, Elizabeth Bishop, Abigail Child, Todd Verow, Sherry Vine | ||
Barbara hammer meshes with maya deren 2011
Barbara Hammer (born May 15, 1939) is an American feminist filmmaker known for being one of the pioneers of lesbian film whose career has spanned over 40 years. Hammer is known for creating experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family.
Contents
- Barbara hammer meshes with maya deren 2011
- Barbara hammer film creativity and process lecture video 2004 1 3
- Biography
- Style and Reception
- Retrospectives
- References
Barbara hammer film creativity and process lecture video 2004 1 3
Biography
Hammer was born in Hollywood, California, becoming familiar with the film industry from a young age, as her grandfather worked as a cook for the American film director D.W. Griffith.
In 1961, Hammer graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology at University of California Los Angeles. She received a master's degree in English literature in 1963. In the early 1970s she studied film at San Francisco State University. This is where she first encountered Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, which inspired her to make experimental films about her personal life.
In 1974, she was married and teaching at a community college in Santa Rosa, California. Around this time she came out as a lesbian, after talking with another student in a feminist group. After leaving her marriage, she "took off on a motorcycle with a Super-8 camera." That year she filmed Dyketatics which is widely considered one of the first lesbian films. She graduated with a Masters in film from San Francisco State University.
She released her first feature film, an experimental documentary, Nitrate Kisses in 1992. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. It won the Polar Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Best Documentary Award at the Internacional de Cine Realizado por Mujeres in Madrid.
Hammer received a Post Masters in Multi-Media Digital Studies, at the American Film Institute in 1997.
In 2000 she received the Moving Image award from Creative Capital and in 2013 she was a Guggenheim Fellow.
She received the first Shirley Clarke Avant-Garde Filmmaker Award in October 2006, the Women In Film Award from the St. Louis International Film Festival in 2006, and in 2009 Hammer received the Teddy Award for the best short film for her film 'A Horse Is Not A Metaphor' at the Berlin International Film Festival.
In 2010, Hammer published her autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, which addresses her personal history and her philosophies on art.
She currently teaches film at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
Style and Reception
Hammer's film, Dyketactics illustrated the importance of the female body to her work, and is shot in two sequences. In the first sequence, the film depicts a group of nude women gathering in the countryside to dance, bathe, touch one another, and interact with the environment. In the second sequence, Hammer herself is filmed sharing an intimate moment with another woman within a Bay Area house. Between the two sequences, Hammer aimed to create an erotic film that used different film language than the mainstream, heterosexual erotic films of the time.
Hammer's early films utilized natural imagery, such as trees and fruit, to be associated with the female body.
This style of film-making was met with mixed reactions. In a review of Hammer's films Women I Love (1976) and Double Strength (1978), critic Andrea Weiss noted, "It's become fashionable for women's bodies to be represented by pieces of fruit," and criticized Hammer for "adopting the masculine romanticized view of women."