Tender Fictions

Barbara Hammer was 30 when she first heard the word “lesbian.” The U.S. filmmaker would go on to play a leading role in the development of a lesbian visual language. This film, the second part of a trilogy that began with Nitrate Kisses and concluded with History Lessons, is both a reflection on and a record of the process through which that language took shape.

Her mother tried to model her on Shirley Temple, but Hammer had to seek her own identity in a society in which some saw lesbianism as fundamentally at odds with womanhood. This is therefore also a film about what it means to be a woman when you are neither a wife nor a mother.

Hammer portrays this search in a collage of home movies, archival footage, and photographs. Of fake mustaches, activism, and sexual discoveries. Of memories of lovers, friends, and her mother. Of images and audio fragments that are cut up, scrambled, duplicated, and repeated in an attempt to unravel the cut-and-paste process through which identity is constructed. To write an autobiography for which no language yet exists, about how we find ourselves by inventing ourselves.

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.