Barbara Forever Reminds Us To Remember Who Tells Our Story and Why

In recent years, I have been encouraged to go through my archives and write my story.  Convinced my life was uneventful, I began to comb through all my momentos, journals, etc…  Then I thought about the end of the musical “Hamilton,” where the lyrics state ” Who lived, who died, who tells your story.”  If i met my fate today or tomorrow what would happen to my memories and all those stories I now longed to share?  Barbara Hammer knew exactly how I felt.

Driven by her canon of over eighty films, a vast collection of unreleased archival materials – hundreds of hours of footage, personal photographs and ephemera, and extensive audio interviews, Barbara Hammer’s story is told in Barbara Forever through her own voice and visual perspective, making her the expert on her life, vision, and motivations. Hammer’s films broke taboos around female sexuality, aging, illness, and queer love, often using her own body as a site of exploration and political power and through the course of this
film, she shows us that the personal is not only political, the personal is historical.

Looking to Barbara Hammer as one of the first filmmakers to put a full lesbian life on screen that wasn’t there before, her work becomes a blueprint for a new generation of queer and radical artists to write their own histories into existence. This exploration of both Barbara Hammer’s life, work, archive, and her ongoing legacy provides an urgent, necessary story of queer life, feminist history, and American cinema.

With this being the last year on the mountain, it is not lost on me that Hammer’s breakout film (produced by Todd Haynes) Nitrate Kisses got theatrical release after playing Sundance in 1993.  What a beautiful way to celebrate a life well-lived.

Turning the lens on a celebrated filmmaker is no easy task, particularly one whose work is as groundbreaking, sensual, and life-affirming as Barbara Hammer’s. Yet, director Brydie O’Connor weaves a kinetic tapestry of archival footage guided by Hammer’s own voice, offering an intimate front-row seat into the mind of a visual poet.  O’Connor’s portrait is an inspiring tribute and candid document of artistic process, capturing the persistence, unabashed ambition, and inevitable tensions such drive creates.

Barbara Hammer’s work opened the door for so many artists, and her legacy, so deftly captured here, reminds us why.  When Hammer was posed with the choice of  being avant garde or a lesbian filmmaker – she chose both.  She chose to be authentically and unapologetically herself and for that we shall be forever grateful.