Conjuring Barbara

This personal essay remembers the filmmaker's encounters with Barbara Hammer as teacher, mentor, and friend. It traces the production of So Many Ideas Impossible to Do All (dir. Mark Street and Barbara Hammer, US, 2019), a film that considers Hammer's epistolary relationship with the poet Jane Brakhage.

Maria Hirszbein: An (In)visible Figure of Polish Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s

This article examines the career of the Polish film producer Maria Hirszbein (1889–1939/1942) in relation to the development of interwar Polish cinema, including Yiddish films, and the modern idea of a “New Woman.” Investigating Hirszbein's activities as the successful manager of her company, Leo-Film, and as cofounder and member of the Polish film producers’ unions, the article explores her professional accomplishments and innovative work style, which was based on teamwork and promoting young, talented actors, creative directors, and screenwriters sensitive to social issues. In reconstructing Hirszbein's professional biography, the text combines different sources such as press reports, film reviews, photographs from the collection of the Polish National Film Archive (FINA), and data collected by the Institute of Jewish History in Warsaw.

Rewitched: Retextuality and the Queering of Bewitched

At the same time the 1960s sitcom Bewitched aired in reruns next to drag queens on LOGOtv, a cable channel targeted to LGBTQ viewers, it also aired on the former National Christian Network channel (FamilyNet) immediately preceding a lineup of church programs featuring far-right, anti-gay hosts. Bewitched's ability to appeal to these very different channels’ brands and audiences underscores a textual vigor and sustainability for success in syndication that even the best so-called quality shows today lack. While some may deride a study of syndication (and reruns especially) as irrelevant and passé, syndicated programs are neither of those things if their continued popularity assures our familiarity with them. As a text, Bewitched is already supple enough to motivate two politically opposing media brands to pick it up, but the context of each of these channels’ flow, including commercials, station IDs, and edits to content, can make the experience of watching the same episode of any show on different channels a wholly different textual experience. This article returns to foundational theories of TV flow and intertextuality to propose retextuality as a theoretical and methodological intervention in studies of television. It argues that in syndication, the production labor of syndicators, executives, programmers, and marketing departments effectively retextualizes shows like Bewitched, offering scholars opportunities for new textual analyses and new insight into the marginalized and queer audiences syndicated programming often serves.

Thinking Travesti Tears: Reading Loxoro

This article offers a reading of the Peruvian film Loxoro (dir. Claudia Llosa, Peru/Spain/Argentina/US, 2011), which stars the transgender activist Belissa Andía. “Loxoro” is the name of a language used by travesti communities to survive in Lima, Peru. The main plot of the film centers on the bond between a travesti mother and her missing travesti daughter. That is why in Loxoro, travesti tears abound. This article raises the following questions: If Loxoro is a language for abandoned and wounded lovers in contexts of dispossession and violence, can travesti tears play a transformative role? What history of travesti tears does Loxoro offer? What forms of travesti loss and kinship imagine the film as deserving to mobilize tears? Can travesti tears foretell transfeminist futures to come?

Thoughts on Making Films with Barbara Hammer

This personal essay articulates filmmaker Lynne Sachs's experiences working with experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Sachs conveys the journey of her relationship with Hammer when they were both artists living in San Francisco in the late 1980s and 1990s and then later in New York City. Sachs initially discusses her experiences making Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (US, 2018), which includes Hammer, the conceptual and performance artist Carolee Schneemann, and the experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson. She then discusses her 2019 film, A Month of Single Frames, which uses material from Hammer's 1998 artist residency in a Cape Cod shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds, and kept a journal. In 2018, Hammer began her process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds, and writing from the residency to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Sachs explores Hammer's experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a way to be in dialogue with both Hammer and her audience. This essay provides context for the intentions and challenges that grew out of both of these film collaborations.

Continuous Weave: Feminist Experimental Filmmaking Genealogies

In the year before her death in 2019, Barbara Hammer gave footage from four incomplete projects as well as funds she had procured from the Wexner Center for the Arts to four fellow filmmakers to use as they wished. Her footage of a Guatemalan marketplace and women weaving was given to Deborah Stratman, whose film Vever (for Barbara) (US, 2019) combines the work of two of her artistic predecessors, Hammer and Maya Deren. Making use of the footage Hammer shot in 1975 as well as passages, images, and sound from Deren's work, Stratman creates a film that underlines several tendencies of feminist experimental art and continues the legacy of all three women's art. Cooperative, collaborative, and productively fragmented, it honors the creative lineage of which it is a part.

Hammertime!

This memoir recounts Barbara Hammer's relationship to the Wexner Center for the Arts and its Film/Video Studio residency program, which supported a number of her films between 1994 and 2018. It offers some personal insight into the evolution of Hammer's final work, Evidentiary Bodies (2018), from single-channel video to multichannel video installation. The author describes working with Hammer during the last year of her life and explains the process of organizing the 2019 exhibition Barbara Hammer: In This Body at the Wexner Center for the Arts, which premiered the installation of Evidentiary Bodies and included additional works in other mediums and made throughout Hammer's career around themes of illness, aging, and death.

Barbara Hammer and Queer|Art: Granting for the Future

This essay describes how the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant came into fruition, created by the pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer and administered through the New York City nonprofit organization Queer|Art. In 2017, Hammer approached her friend and colleague Ira Sachs to set up a grant in her honor, through the nonprofit he founded in 2009 with the mission to create a diverse and vibrant community through the support of LGBTQ+ art and artists across generations and disciplines. Author and grant manager Vanessa Haroutunian describes the process of working with Hammer to develop the grant, how Hammer's commitment to intergenerational, interdisciplinary conversation cultivated permission for future generations to break boundaries with their artwork, and how her legacy continues to be preserved through the grant's existence. Hammer's mission—to make it easier for self-identified lesbian experimental filmmakers to make work—has been upheld by Queer|Art with the generous support of Florrie Burke and the Hammer estate.

Introduction: Late Hammer

This introduction to a dossier of short pieces on Barbara Hammer locates the work of the late filmmaker in the context of feminist film culture and the journal Camera Obscura. It briefly reviews several phases of the artist's career before focusing on the output of the last decade of the filmmaker's life. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Hammer made work dealing with her body; gave footage she shot over the years to several filmmakers to finish as they wished; set up a grant for lesbian experimental filmmakers; and collaborated with curators, archivists, and her partner, Florrie Burke, to shape her own legacy. Pieces by the collaborators who contributed to this dossier are introduced.

The Documentaries of Barbara Hammer: Lesbian Creativity, Kinship, and Erotic Pleasure in the Historical Margins

Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer turned from experimental filmmaking to feature-length documentaries in the early 1990s. These late documentaries illustrate her distinct perspective on queer history and affect, which was influenced by 1970s lesbian feminism and queer scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Her structure and style in these films draw on the tools of both conventional historical documentaries and experimental film. Offering an astonishing range of evidence, Hammer creatively presents queer plenty from the margins of the archive. Through this evidence, Hammer affirms past queer lives, celebrating and highlighting rebelliousness, agency, creativity, queer kinship, and passion. Additionally, Hammer attempts to communicate with and embody the past, physically and emotionally seeking out and feeling the interior and exterior lives of her biographical subjects, who are predominantly creative women, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the Dada artist Hannah Höch, the surreal photographer Claude Cahun, and the painter Nicole Eisenman.