Barbara Hammer. Meshes with Maya Deren. 2011

www.egs.edu/, Barbara Hammer, experimental filmmaker, lesbian artist and feminist talking about Maya Deren. In this lecture she reads an excerpt from her book Hammer! in which she recounts her experience in discovering the cinema of Maya Deren, and talks about Deren's impact on her own work, gives some biographical data about Maya Deren as well as some background information on the making of Maya Deren's "Meshes in the Afternoon", which she screens back to back with her new film "Maya Deren's Sink". She then goes on to talk about her film "Generations", which she worked on with Gina Carducci, and opens up the floor for discussion. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011.
Barbara Hammer is a lesbian filmmaker and widely held to be an originator of queer cinema. She was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. A highly prolific filmmaker and videographer, Barbara Hammer has directed over eighty films and videos throughout her thirty-year career. Barbara Hammer made the world's first lesbian films in 1974 (Dyketactics) and 1976 (Women I Love). Since then she has made over three dozen films. Her most recent feature length films include Lover Other (2006) and Resisting Paradise (2003).
Barbara Hammer's work has received international exposure and recognition. In 2007, The Chinese Cultural University, Taiwan, held a retrospective for Barbara Hammer as a tribute to her work. Barbara Hammer's films, most of them shot on Super-8 or 16mm film, engage in a dialectic with the material dimension of film. This can be seen clearly in her film Sanctus (1990), which was created from previously shot film of moving x-rays by Dr. James Sibley Watson. The technological dimension of bodily movements and functions emerges in pulsating visual sentences overlapping text, portrait, and diagram. Sanctus, as well as her work in the 1980s, makes use of optical printing as a means of transgressing the purity of perception. Barbara Hammer also uses archival footage in her films, for example footage of Black Panther rallies and labor strikes in the film Tender Fictions (1995), to contextualize her personal experience as a lesbian filmmaker. One of her most recent work is an experimental film on cancer and hope, A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, which she premiered in June, 2008 at the 32nd Frameline International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in San Francisco. A Horse Is Not A Metaphor was selected for the Documentary Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2009 where it won the Teddy Award for Best Queer Short Film. The film is in the short film competition at Punta de Vista Film Festival in Pamplona, Spain and Festival des Films des Femmes, Creteil, France.
Barbara Hammer teaches each summer at The European Graduate School EGS in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Barbara Hammer lives and works in New York City. She has had retrospectives at The Berlin Film Festival and Centre Pompidou, Paris in 1985, the Digital University Taiwan in 2005, and Universitad Complutense in Madrid in 2008. Barbara Hammer received an IASPIS artist residency for 2009 in Sweden. Her memoir HAMMER, Making It in Sex and Movies is from the Feminist Press at CUNY and was published in the spring of 2010. The book covers the wild days of non-monogamy in the 1970s, the development of a queer aesthetic in the 1980s, the fight for visibility during the culture wars of the 1990s, her search for meaning as she contemplates mortality in the past ten years-HAMMER! includes texts from these periods, new writings, and fully contextualized film stills to create a memoir as innovative and disarming as her work has always been. The publication of the book coincided with a retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Reina Sophia in Madrid, and the Tate Modern in London. In 2011 Barbara won the TEDDY for the Best Short Film: "Generations" by Barbara Hammer and Gina Carducci & "Maya Deren's Sink" by Barbara Hammer.