LESBIAN HUMOR
($19.95 + shipping) One VHS with 6 films:
Menses, 16mm, color, sound, 4 min., 1974
A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of
menstruation where women act out their own dramas on a California
hillside, in a supermarket, in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding.
Menses combines both the imagery and the politics of menstruation in a
fine blend of comedy and drama.
Superdyke, 16mm, color, sound, 20 min., 1975
A comedy about a troop of shield-bearing Amazons who
take over city institutions before relaxing in the country.
"Superdyke
took women into the streets when Barbara armed a platoon of vagina
warriors with Amazon shields in an attempt to overthrow San Francisco.
They marched through City Hall, usurped the bus lines, demythologized
the consumer mentality at Macy's (to the recorded astonishment of
casual shoppers), and wandered through the erotic art museum. Barbara's
frenetic handheld lens caught the startled reactions and the glee of
the participants. Superdyke has a home-movie quality to it, but its committed and loose moments in the playground confirm its comic rationale."
--P. Gregory Springer
Our Trip, 16mm, color, sound, 4 min., 1980
An erotic/political series of female/lesbian images,
but leads into Hammer's later use of the confluence of mixed media in
her films.
"Feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer has celebrated her
recent trip to Peru with her friend Corky Wick through a diaristic
animation of photographs they took during their travels. Landscapes and
portraits are given growing patterns of framing and texture with magic
markers and tempera paint, expressing the richly evocative folk art of
the Incan people they saw as we hear their native music resonate on the
soundtrack."
--Anthony Reveaux
Sync Touch, 16mm, color, sound, 10 min., 1980
A lesbian/feminist aesthetic proposing the connection
between touch and sight to be the basis for a "new cinema." The film
explores the tactile child nature within the adult woman filmmaker, the
scientific analysis of the sense of touch, and the personal connection
between sexuality and filmmaking.
"Despite the serious intent of her work, most of her
films are imbued with humor. Cheek to cheek with her lover, Hammer
repeats the French-speaking woman's enunciation of amorous aphorisms
and scientific truisms, which are simultaneously subtitled."
--Aimee Leduc, The Body Politic
No No Nooky T.V., 16mm, color and B&W, sound, 12 min., 1987
Using a 16mm Bolex and Amiga computer, Hammer creates
a witty and stunning film about how women view their sexuality versus
the way male images of women and sex are perceived. The impact of
technology on sexuality and emotion and the sensual self is explored
through computer language juxtaposed with everyday colloquial language
of sex. No No Nooky T.V.
confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic
language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this
film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in
our post-industrial age.
Doll House, 16mm, color and B&W, sound, 3 min., 1984
"Rapid montage shows a plethora of objects all
arranged in, or with reference to, the central prop of a dollhouse. We
see whimsical references to domesticity (kitchen implements), clothing,
the housing situation, feminist film, relationships, claustrophobia.
The final shots show the dollhouse outside, up in the branches of a
tree-by the effort of cinema, the dollhouse has become a treehouse.
This thematic movement mirrors the movement of Barbara Hammer's films
in the last few years: from preoccupation with inside/the body, to a
claiming of outside/the landscape."
--Claudia Gorbman, Jump Cut
