To call Barbara Hammer one of the greatest lesbian filmmakers to ever live is simply a fact. With a career spanning over 50 years, Hammer spent much of that time crafting queer masterpieces like Dyketactics, No No Nooky T.V., and Nitrate Kisses and always questioning both her own interests and the form she worked within. Spending decades of that lifetime archiving and maintaining records of her thoughts and works was just part of that great experiment called life she led, often sharing herself in her work (be it her films or even the book she wrote titled Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life).
Six years after her passing, filmmaker Brydie O’Connor has helped bring even more of Hammer’s life and work to us in the form of Barbara Forever, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and now begins its theatrical release in New York City and beyond. O’Connor’s documentary oozes love for Hammer, digging deep into the filmmaker’s own archive and copious vocal recordings to create a portrait of a woman that feels accessible and personal. It’s at once an engrossing glimpse into her personal and professional life for those who already adore her and an ideal starting point for those who have never heard of the icon.
Shortly after its Sundance premiere, we sat down to chat with Brydie O’Connor over the phone about working with Hammer’s archive with the help of her longtime partner and human rights activist Florrie Burke, as well as what it was like to put together such a loving tribute to an artist who has impacted so many of us.
Before we dive into Barbara and the film, I wanted to ask you specifically about your interest in archival work. You’ve worked as an archival producer on various docs and your last short was The Roaming Center for Magnetic Alternatives, which was all about archiving these queer histories. What draws you to this kind of work; of both preservation and showcasing the archives?
I’m fascinated by how archives contribute to a broader history, a broader queer history, and this idea of who makes history and who is left out, so looking to personal collections as legitimate markers of history and the ways that we can see ourselves and our lineage with people who came before us is really special to me. I also love the process of spending time with both archival footage and in paper archives; it feels like such a treasure hunt.
My background is working as an archival producer, but what’s so cool about actually making films about the archives or working with them is that there’s always a learning curve involved with understanding them, providing context, and assigning meaning. I love thinking of ways that the archives can converse with the present and I studied American history in school which was really an entry point.
Having a background in history probably helps for placing those personal collections in a larger historical context too.
Yeah, especially in making Barbara Forever. I was really interested in how Barbara’s specific perspective would reveal a look into the cultural ecosystems that surrounded her and how Barbara (and her films, outtakes, and archive) could serve as a prism for those ecosystems. We’re getting a look at Barbara Hammer’s life and work, but also a glimpse at San Francisco in the 1970s or the New York art world in the 1980s.
And something fascinating about the documentary is the way you take all these disparate recordings from her lifetime and weave them together. You can literally hear her age and voice change from one second to the next. Did her recordings lend themselves well to creating such a fluid trajectory for the film?
The way we decided to approach blending pieces of her vast and expansive archive was consciously deciding not to name what point in her life any given audio recording came from. Barbara had such foresight and hoped she would achieve so many things that she did end up achieving. And she hoped that, in the future, beyond her death, there would be a world that she envisioned. Creating that fluidity in time and linearity, especially through her voice, allowed Barbara to converse with herself while reflecting and validating some of the things that she says as a younger woman later on when you can hear the age and sickness in her voice.
Her frustration with a lack of recognition, as well as the misogyny and homophobia inherent in avant-garde and academic settings, is so consistent too. In creating this tribute piece to her, do you feel like she has attained more of the “legitimacy” she desired?
I think that Barbara did achieve so much of that recognition and legitimacy in her lifetime and I think she was able to feel a lot of that. Florrie, her widow, has specifically said she’s so grateful that Barbara was able to feel that at the end of her life, with things like the performance/talk at the Whitney and doing an oral history with the Academy Film Archive. I think that Barbara wanted to reach broader audiences until the end and have her work accessed by different groups of people, not just queer people and film people in the art world. She felt she had a really specific way of viewing and questioning the world, being playful with processing that, and I think that she wanted to invite others to do a version of that on their own. Something I’ve been talking about with the team and Florrie is that Barbara is such an amazing character and able to tell her own story so well that I think we have created something that hopefully invites more people into Barbara’s world so that her vision can be transferred onto a new generation by providing greater access to her vision.
How do you balance presenting Barbara’s own art and voice in a distinct way that still captures her art while also having to preserve your own voice and strike your own tone? Did you ever feel any pressure to sort of match her work in your own formal approach?
You know, I’ve gotten this question about pressure specifically a handful of times, which makes sense because Barbara is such a prolific and iconic lesbian filmmaker. I didn’t feel like I needed to emulate her experimental filmmaking approach in the form of the film, but I did feel like the structure of the film and the way we laid out her life story needed to be something that felt reflective of her unconventional way of living and creating. I didn’t need to make an experimental film about her because she was an experimental filmmaker; I wanted to balance that idea of presenting experimental work in a way that could be accessible and excite viewers to check out Barbara’s work after the fact.
But a film about Barbara deserves something that is not traditional in its form, so we’ve been calling our approach a “queer chronology” where we kind of dip in and out of living in the present, which is also living in Barbara’s future. Honestly the only pressure I felt, which never came from Florrie at all, was wanting to make Florrie proud. I wanted her to feel like it’s true to Barbara’s spirit. The only reason I had so much freedom to experiment with and develop my own voice is because of the trust, encouragement, and support from Florrie. She just believed in my idea for the film and the team that we’d assembled and said, “Barbara would want you to just go for it.”
And it’s honestly lovely how much you incorporate Florrie because it adds to how Barbara wasn’t a great isolated artist but one whose personal connections were essential to her. Everything with Florrie and the segments with [trans filmmaker] Joey Carducci’s work and his relationship with Barbara feel especially key. There’s so much humanity to this archive. Were those intended to highlight those relationships that sort of extend beyond her?
It was always a part of the film because we’re living in Barbara’s vision for the future and experiencing that in real time, as well as the impact of her art after the fact. She has this living legacy, ongoing and with a heartbeat. But I did have different ideas of what that could look like, because there’s so many people who Barbara has impacted so deeply and who are in conversation with her work. At the end of the day, my guiding principle for it to just be Florrie and Joey was that I wanted it to strike an emotional note. I wanted the audience to feel the duality of Barbara’s absence and presence.
Speaking of her presence, what was your first experience with Barbara’s work, and how do you feel about it now versus when you first discovered it?
I learned about Barbara’s work when I was in college; I was writing my thesis and wanted to write about lesbian films made by lesbian filmmakers. So when I typed that into Google, it was like “Hammer, of course.” [laughs] I had to reach out to Barbara at the time because her films weren’t available for purchase, but I picked up her films from the 70s and got to know her a bit through that before moving to New York after I graduated. My first impression of her 70s work was how they worked in context with each other, like Dyketactics, Menses, Superdyke, Women I Love, and Double Strength.
The biggest difference now, in understanding Barbara’s work and her filmography, is just understanding her questions about the world. Even though her work changed over time, it’s about how those questions about what it means to age and live life in a lesbian body are applied throughout her films, no matter the context. Those questions become more nuanced and exploratory the longer she worked. Even though Optic Nerve in the 80s is about her grandmother, she’s experimenting formally with the optical printer and what she can visually do. She’s always interrogating the body of a woman and what happens in the world. And I just find that my understanding of this idea of visibility of the body in her filmography in various contexts has expanded dramatically and tremendously.
It’s really special because, like Barbara says at the beginning of the film: “What if I follow this one life from birth to death? What will that reveal?” And I think it revealed a lot to her, but in my own experience, starting with her as a baby dyke and her dyke adolescence, to now, I feel like I’ve grown up with her in the past decade of research.
