Barbara Hammer,
Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life.
New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
ISBN 9 781558616 12 7
Au$19.95 (pb)
281pp
(Review copy supplied by The Feminist Press)
At first glance, I thought that Hammer! would be an overview of the famous British horror film studio. A closer inspection revealed that this is actually the autobiography of independent US filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Hammer was born in California in 1939 and describes herself as “a child of the depression” (p. 8). She came out as a lesbian in the early 1970s and (around the same time) discovered a passion for filmmaking. In the decades that followed, Hammer went on to make over eighty film and video projects. These works have dealt with topics ranging from lesbian sexuality to ageing and illness, and reflect Hammer’s belief that “(a)rt and politics go hand in hand” (p. 112).
The book comprises moments of reminiscence by Hammer that were (presumably) written in the present, as well as articles that have previously been published in journals and books. The author could have indicated briefly at the beginning that her text would adopt this kind of structure. Such a disclaimer might eliminate some confusion (this reviewer initially wondered whether he was reading an essay collection with some authorial padding-out). That being said, the book flows smoothly from start to finish.
The most impressive aspect of Hammer! is the passion which this filmmaker exudes for her craft. Hammer aims to “empower an audience” by “ask(ing) them to envision their own ideas and ways of understanding, by watching a film that avoids determined answers” (p. 245). Hammer also aims to politically empower marginalised groups, particularly lesbians. In films such as Dyketactics (USA 1974) and Women I Love (USA 1976), Hammer has tried to reclaim lesbian desire from those men who set out to titillate heterosexual male viewers with airbrushed images of girl-on-girl action. Hammer has attempted to write lesbians into cinematic history, both as subjects of representation and as artists. As she argues in a 1981 article that is republished in this volume: “There are no examples of lesbian filmmakers who identify themselves publicly as lesbians in the past” (p. 99).
Hammer’s opposition to censorship is admirable. She contends: “Freedom of expression exists when we claim it and insist upon it … We must be active and act with continual self-expression” (p. 228). Hammer rightly criticises those gays and lesbians who have attempted to ban sexually-explicit queer works on the basis that these works are “pornographic”, and therefore misogynist (p. 225). However, she stops short of name-calling or reproducing the crude ‘pro-/anti-pornography’ stereotypes that characterised the so-called ‘sex wars’[1] . Also, Hammer steers clear of the libertarian myth that sex (representational and otherwise) is always inherently liberating.
A distinguishing feature of Hammer’s career has been her refusal to “allow the community” – and, specifically, the box office – “to control her” (p. 104). She has never achieved celebrity in the best-known sense of that term, and indeed her name remains unfamiliar to a number of my own film scholar friends. However, Hammer wisely refuses to argue that queer filmmakers can work completely outside – or in opposition to – the market economy. This argument is simplistic, and particularly so in an era when queer identities are routinely packaged for mass consumption (witness the popularity of TV shows such as The L-Word (Canada/USA 2004-) and films such as Brokeback Mountain (Canada/USA 2005), as well as the proliferation of homoerotic imagery in fashion advertising).
Hammer! is compulsory reading for all those interested in independent filmmaking and queer cinema. The book offers a thorough overview of Hammer’s oeuvre, and will hopefully go some way towards fulfilling her wish of being remembered as a “remarkable and complex woman” (p. 109).
Jay Daniel Thompson,
Melbourne, Australia.
Endnotes
[1] For a nuanced overview of the ‘sex wars’, see Rebecca Beirne, Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millenium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Created on: Thursday, 4 November 2010