This cinematic pioneer turned lesbian desire into cinema and made sure it could never be ignored
BY ROISIN TEELING, IMAGE FROM BARBARA FOREVER
If Barbara Hammer isn’t already on your radar, I’m afraid her name is about to be plastered all over your Letterboxd account. A pioneer of lesbian filmmaking and an icon of queer experimental cinema, Hammer once said, “I was born when I became a lesbian”, The line captures both her personal awakening and the radical visibility she insisted on bringing to women’s bodies and desires onscreen.
Last week, BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival screened Barbara Forever, fresh from its Teddy Award win at the Berlin International Film Festival. Directed by Brydie O’Connor, the archive-driven documentary assembles Hammer’s life through her own voice and footage, tracing a career devoted to making lesbian existence undeniable. It’s hardly a quiet introduction, then again, Hammer was never particularly interested in being quiet. As Hammer herself once put it: “If you don’t see lesbian history, you have to make it yourself.”
Born in Hollywood in 1939, Hammer’s life could easily have followed a more conventional script. Her mother imagined something close to a Shirley Temple trajectory with childhood stardom and silver screens, but that narrative never materialised. Instead, Hammer married young and set off on a round-the-world motorbike trip, a journey that in retrospect reads as the first step away from a life that never quite fit. It wasn’t until she was 30, when she first encountered the word “lesbian,” that everything changed. Armed with a Super 8 camera and a newly claimed identity, she began making films that mirrored that rupture and captured what it meant to inhabit a body and a desire the world had refused to see.
The 1970s may have been the era of bell-bottoms and feminist manifestos, but lesbian desire remained largely absent from the screen. Hammer’s early films such as Dyketactics, Women I Love, and Superdyke, were sensuous, ecstatic invitations to experience queer embodiment from the inside. By the 1980s, she had moved even further from the mainstream just as the world around her was combusting. The AIDS crisis was devastating communities, Reagan-era conservatism was tightening its grip and queer activists were fighting for survival and visibility. Hammer made Nitrate Kisses which interwove interviews with elderly gay and lesbian couples with erotic imagery to reclaim suppressed histories. Tender Fictions turned the camera toward her own life to interrogate how dominant culture, and even the archive itself, erases women and queer people.
In 2006, Hammer was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Slowing down wasn’t her style and over the next decade, she continued to make films with the same relentless curiosity that had defined her career. A Horse Is Not A Metaphor traced her body through chemotherapy and horseback rides, transforming illness into a meditation on mortality and fleeting beauty. Her final work, Evidentiary Bodies, expanded this exploration into a three-channel installation with an original score as proof that Hammer didn’t simply endure, she kept creating.
Her 31-year relationship with Florrie R. Burke was tenderly depicted in Barbara Forever. Beyond her own films, Hammer actively supported emerging artists, establishing grants and mentorship initiatives including the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant in New York and the Queer Filmmaking Award at San Francisco State University.
For anyone discovering her now, consider this an invitation to watch closely, listen carefully, and allow yourself to be altered by a filmmaker who demanded that the world pay attention.
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