Lesbian Whale

Part of Pavilion Shorts: Barbara Hammer on October 2

The year 1970 marked a turning point in Barbara Hammer’s personal and artistic development: she left the man she had married almost a decade earlier and decided to devote herself seriously to filmmaking. In 2015, prompted by an exhibition of her early work, Hammer selected a small number of drawings she had made between 1969 and 1971—some of them doodles alongside entries in her diary—and animated them into a film.

In Lesbian Whale, we not only see these animations but also hear the voices of artist friends, often younger queer artists, whom Hammer invited to browse her archive in her studio and watch excerpts from the film. By incorporating their responses to her images and texts, Hammer gives the film a collaborative, intergenerational character and emphasizes, as she had previously done in Audience, the extent to which her art is rooted in a need to share personal experiences, impressions, and thoughts through interaction with an audience.

This screening is part of Focus: Barbara Hammer, a program presenting films by American filmmaker and visual artist Barbara Hammer. See the full program here.