Feisty feminist film-maker Barbara Hammer introduced Fabius Burger to new ways of seeing
ONE heard that director Barbara Hammer, here for the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, is “very feisty” _ read “intimidating”. In Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema, Andrea Weiss describes Hammer’s work as “transgressive” and Hammer as a “cultural feminist” who “tried to create a women’s culture that came as close to lesbian nirvana and kept as far from patriachal realities as possible”.
The Hammer one meets is a friendly, intellectual artist who’s … well, feisty. She hugged the few fundamentalists who picketed the festival in Johannesburg and called her a “sodomite”. One hears they freaked. Well, it was a great photo opportunity.
She’s unexpectedly concerned about the transport system here in Johannesburg; she must be one of the few VIP visitors actually using it. “What I saw was black people walking and white people driving.” Getting around is expensive _ a group from a township had to hire a taxi for R350 to get to the festival’s opening night. Hammer’s points make sense: what use is a free, vibrant cultural life if no one has physical access to it?
If Hammer feels involved, it’s because South Africa has changed her perceptions. “It’s a very complex country. I’m very sobered by the experiences I’ve had, the stories I’ve heard, even if I can’t be anything but an outsider appreciating the complexity.” But the effect has also been artistic. She’s making a video, using her work to explore the country.
In America, Hammer accepted criticism about her work being “essentialist”, limited to the body, women and nature. That was living in California, she suggests.
But the “Reagan years were very repressive and my lesbian work wasn’t being shown”, so she challenged herself by moving to New York. “I am a fine artist who works with film. I was known by the gay community, not the art community. So I took women out of my films for a while, and worked solely with landscape and questions of perception.”
She bought an optical printer to work frame by frame on her films. The structuralists used the device in the Sixties, with the avant-garde and the minimalists, to emphasise film form _ zooms, scratches on film, and so on. “They left the heart out,” she says. “I reintroduced emotion, used a mechanical device in an emotional way.”
One of her films was made in the home where her grandmother was placed. “It was very upsetting to find her there. I worked with all kinds of personal feelings, with a sense of the fragility of film. I show the sprocket and frame lines on the film that also represent the fragility of life.”
For another Hammer film, Sanctus, a musician fed Bach, Beethoven and other composers into a computer. “They were stretched, switched backwards and forwards, their dynamics changed.” She created images that were moving X-rays, taken from the archives of a doctor, James Watson, who helped develop cineradiography. A woman putting on lipstick becomes a “skeleton with rings and with her teeth showing”. There are also “interior” images _ among them you can see children’s hearts _ created by the process used for angiograms.
Now she’s working on an autobiography. “I thought: talk about saving history, Barbara, look at your own. Later life is not all just sex and flowers and romping in the wood.”
But after visiting South Africa, even this project has a new meaning: “If you’re, say, Zulu, you don’t speak as an `I’ but as a community or a group. There isn’t this Western, narcissistic, egocentric autobiographical I.” Perhaps that “I” should be “eye”: as a film artist, Hammer is creating new ways of looking _ both through the personal (I) and the communal (eye), if you want to get all avant-garde about this.