Journal Issue 2.supplement
Summer 2010
Edited by Deanna Utroske, Agatha Beins, Karen Alexander, Julie Ann Salthouse, and Jillian Hernandez
Managing Editor: Katherine O’Connor

An Interview with Barbara Hammer

Utroske: Great. Can you talk about your experience as a feminist teacher and if you separate that politically from your work making film?

Hammer: Do I separate my feminist politics from making film, from teaching film? Do I compartmentalize my life? Well I’m on the faculty at the European Graduate School in Saas-fee, Switzerland. Last year I had a class, and the director [of the European Graduate School] doesn’t really want production to happen in the school. I’m teaching the documentary film, or I’m teaching queer cinema, or experimental cinema. Whatever I want to teach, I teach. I had a very astute group of students, six or seven, and one of them had brought a very nice, new HD Sony camera to class. He was off to shoot a film afterwards. One woman [in the class] teaches writing and is very keen on African-American cinema. In some areas the students had more knowledge than I have. One thing I do since I’m the teacher is turn the class over to the person with the most knowledge on the subject under inquiry. In this case, the young teacher led the discussion on Langston Hughes and on the documentary about Langston Hughes. After that seminar under student leadership and our inspection of the camera, we were all just dying to use the HD camera. We ended up making a film in class. A class that started out as a theory class became a production class, but we talked about theory as we worked. So the abstract and the practical merged.

We didn’t have time to edit the film, but several students decided that they wanted to edit it. I gave them a guideline and said you have to have it done before school starts. Our class was in June, so I said you have to finish by August, and then send us all Quicktime files. That gave structure. I knew that one student would begin teaching in September, so I asked her to get it done before her own students arrived. August came and lo and behold, there it was, something entirely different than I’d expected. They’d pulled clips from YouTube and Vimeo and collaged them with material we had shot in class.

The material we shot in class was guided by a particular workshop that I’ve developed over many years. I’ve named it Developing Personal Imagery, and I guide the students on a meditation that is body-focused and that becomes a film script. They draw an outline of their bodies. They see images in different areas. They draw those images. At the end of this several-hour class we have, hanging on the wall, the replica images of each of the students. Then we go through them, finding areas of similarity. And we start making the class script and film from that.

Utroske: This spring you were touring to promote your book, Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life (2010). Could you summarize your book tour and talk about how the audiences were different or similar from audiences that you encounter when you’re screening film?

Hammer: I wrote a book last year, and it came out in March. It’s called Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life. The publisher, the Feminist Press, set up a tour for me. So I screened the book, [laughs], I mean I screened the film! I’m so used to making films and not writing books that I actually performed the book. And this is quite unusual because I worked for 40 years and made so many films, and I have boxes of costumes and plenty of stories to tell. As a young feminist in the 1970s I wore costumes to my film screenings. I’ve kept my costumes, and I have an archive of them. I took about eight or nine clips from films that span from 1970 to 2008, and each of these clips is two to four minutes. I wear a different costume to introduce each one of those clips. On the stage we build a little changing room. While the clip is showing, say of an early film Menses (1974), a satire of menstruation, I’m inside the changing room putting on a Superdyke! T-shirt that I wore in 1975 along with the group of women, Superdyke!, who all wore the same T-shirts. Then we’d screen Superdyke! (1975). I’ll read about why I made Menses, that there was so much misinformation through the ages; for example, Pliny wrote that if a menstruating woman touches a pregnant mare her milk will go sour. There are all these old myths, but they influence us today. In 1973 the group of women I made the film with were in a PayLess drugstore ripping open Kotex boxes and coming out the doors swinging Tampaxes. Using humor was really important for me to reach the audience.

I don’t know if the book tour audience is any different than my film-going audience. People know me through my films. Here in New York I had a reading with Hilton Als. I hadn’t met him before. But of course I bought his book before we got together. This joint reading brought together a different audience because there were probably people who knew him but didn’t know me and vice versa. I liked that. He’s the theater critic for The New Yorker as well as an author in his own right. If you read his book The Women (1996), which was published 10 years ago, you will see that one-third of the book, and it’s a very small book at 110 pages, is devoted to his mother. It’s just beautiful writing.

Then Elizabeth Streb and I read together. She’s a choreographer who uses dancers’ bodies to test physics it seems. Slam-dance it’s called. She and I had a reading together. And that was very hot because we were both almost slamming against each other, verbally. And the audience was full of her followers. It was at Barnes and Noble, so that gave it an official bookstore setting.

I know that in Brussels they heard about the book tour performance I gave in London at the British Film Institute, and now they want me to perform at the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, which I will do in October this year.