The first out lesbian filmmaker lived and died in her movies

For lesbian film pioneer Barbara Hammer, her body was her journal, and her movies captured the many diary entries of her life. She told her own story, documenting the sexual revolution of her day, celebrating queer womanhood, exploring the boundaries of gender expectations and gender nonconformity. She also pushed the boundaries of traditional filmmaking, double-exposing her negatives to create dreamy sequences and eschewing all narrative expectations. Often using her nude body as part of their focus, Hammer’s films are a parallel autobiography, incorporating former lovers and new experiences as part of their premises. Now Hammer is finally getting her overdue flowers as both a pioneer of queer art and experimental film in Brydie O’Connor’s documentary Barbara Forever. 

O’Connor’s feature debut reuses Hammer’s own body of work to form the bones of the documentary. Interviews (new and archival), photographs, and other treasures from Hammer’s personal collection at Yale fill in the gaps of her story. O’Connor recreates Hammer’s biography illustrated by these images, many of which are of Hammer herself. The various stages she shares of her own body tells the story not just of Hammer’s life, but of aging and desire, of comfort and illness. These movies chart a timeline starting from when she noticed that there was no one like her on screen and she manifested an entire existence through her camera; from her birth (which she says happened when she realized she was a lesbian at age 30), to her death, brought on by ovarian cancer and its harsh treatment. 

Whether the bodies were old or young, Hammer groused when audiences looked away from the nudity in her films. That sense of unbridled discovery—of taking pleasure, shedding shame, and embracing the natural—was a cornerstone of her work throughout her life. Hammer’s voice says as much, narrating most of Barbara Forever, with the occasional input from Florrie Burke, her long-term partner. While the film is in chronological order, the voiceover is stitched together from various sources over a number of eras in Hammer’s life. Her voice fluctuates from age, as older recordings of her younger self alternate with her final interviews when her voice, worn down by illness, sounds barely louder than a whisper. But still, she fights to tell her part of the story—of which aging is a key part—and to make sure lesbian history as she saw it was not forgotten. 

O’Conner’s film follows Hammer’s sexual awakening as it blossoms into a filmmaking career. One of her early works, Dyketactics, was “the first lesbian lovemaking film to be made by a lesbian.” After coming out in her 30s, Hammer threw herself into discovering this new side of herself, often with the camera rolling. Her earliest films were equally curious and ambitious, full of playful desire, carnal hunger, and uninhibited glee as women danced naked in nature—the kind of behavior might have gotten a woman stoned to death for witchcraft a few centuries earlier, and which may have earned queer Americans the same fate depending on the time and place. But it was the 1960s and ’70s in San Francisco when Hammer started to film herself unclothed, documenting the radical ideas of exploring her body, her sexuality, and her art all at once.