Sarah Keller, Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame

Abstract

Barbara Hammer is a key figure within experimental film, her work often linked to the heightened visibility of LGBTQ+ cinema and media over the last two decades of the 20th century, which culminated in what came to be known as New Queer Cinema.1 Hammer’s diverse work provided a springboard for queer and feminist experimental cinema, and throughout a career spanning nearly 50 years she persistently explored the boundaries of the medium. Hammer also challenged the traditional spaces of cinema exhibition, giving screenings in womens’ clubs, museums and galleries, and blurring the lines between film as a theatrical phenomenon and film as art practice. In works such as Available Space (1979), Hammer shook up the convention of the passive, seated audience by projecting her film from a wheeled rotary projector table that she shifted around the architectural space, coaxing the audience to move about in order to see the film. As Sarah Keller puts it, ‘energizing the spaces and scope of cinema’ and ‘pushing out of the frame’ were among Hammer’s chief objectives (p. 15). Hammer also holds a prominent place in the development of queer experimental documentary. In works such as her landmark, feature-length film Nitrate Kisses (1992), she honed factual film’s relations with personal expression and sensual engagement, joining the contemporary documentary experiments of Marlon Riggs, Tom Joslin and Trinh T. Minh-ha, among others, in transforming documentary conventions and expectations.