BARBARA FOREVER – Review by Loren King
Brydie O’Connor’s captivating and comprehensive Barbara Forever gives pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer the documentary she deserves.
You don’t have to be a fan of avant-garde cinema to appreciate the brilliance of Hammer’s vision or her audacious style. For this singular filmmaker, who considered herself a visual poet, her life and art were one and the same. Hammer created some 100 groundbreaking experimental films from 1970 up to her death from cancer in 2019. The soft-core eroticism of Dyketactics (1974) and her radical breakout first feature Nitrate Kisses (1992) intimately depicted lesbian life and sexuality at a time when no other filmmaker was creating such narratives.
O’Connor captures Hammer’s creative process, driving passion and rebel spirit by constructing Barbara Forever almost entirely from the filmmaker’s own images and narration. We get a generous cavalcade of clips from films she made during the early ‘70s second wave feminism, first in San Francisco and then in New York where Hammer moved to break into the art world and then for years encountered resistance from the white male establishment. She never compromised her art and, eventually, her work was recognized and lauded by film festivals, museums and academia.
Hammer’s playful but keen sense of purpose in documenting lives and bodies not seen on screen or acknowledged in cultural discourse was the very definition of the personal as political. She was archiving from the start. Her fearlessness and commitment to her art extended even to her own mortality. After her cancer diagnosis, Hammer in characteristic fashion approached death as an adventure and produced some of her most intimate work during this period particularly the stunning A Horse is Not a Metaphor (2009).
Barbara Forever celebrates Hammer’s legacy but it’s also invaluable as queer and feminist history. To see a panel at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival with Todd Haynes and B. Ruby Rich discussing queer cinema, or interviews over the years with Hammer herself and her life partner and sometimes reluctant collaborator Florrie Burke who is now the executor of her estate, is both illuminating and vital to the canon.
