Barbara Hammer | Audience / 1982

time capsule of lesbian film

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Hammer (director) Audience / 1982

 

Long time lesbian filmmaker finally had three retrospectives in the early 1980s, in San Francisco, London, and Toronto. In 1982-1982, Hammer put together a series of interviews that she had made with audiences at those events, beginning with a simple questioning of the long line waiting to get into the San Francisco Roxie, mostly asking women and a few men what they expected to see inside.

     The answers were fairly predictable, if somewhat diverse. Some looked forward to being emotionally moved, others were looking for something sexy, others simply for entertainment. Several of these women had heard of Hammer or her work but had never seen her films in a time before the internet and the numerous LGBTQ film festivals of today. A few had seen her films in Germany, France, or elsewhere. One elderly gay man simply reported that he attended all such events but didn’t have a clue about what he was about to see, perhaps not even recognizing that he was talking to the director herself.

      But what is amazing about these encounters is the near unanimous excitement of being with so many fellow lesbians in one theater, and the film joyfully embraces that sort of raucousness. Even in San Francisco, it was still difficult to express same-sex feelings in public, and except for bars, private gatherings, and special occasions as these the coming together of so many various women of the same sex was not common. One can sense the thrill of the experience.

     Before the films began Hammer spoke, talking about how she wanted her audience to actually feel the sensation of the films, to share the emotional responses of the women within her films. She spoke of a desire for a tactile presence and a full emotional response. In Pools, she laughed, she wanted the women “to get wet.”

     In a discussion after the British showing, the women who gathered all clearly felt positive about what they had just witnessed, but were perhaps a little stunned by something which they claimed they had seldom experienced before on film. They were not so much shocked, but some of them a little offended of the actual display of a female vagina, fearful that it might border on pornography or that it might be used for other purposes by male viewers. There were even questions of whether or not males should be permitted to see her films, something Hammer and others strongly argued against since it was perhaps most necessary to educate males about the lesbian world so that they might comprehend that lesbians too participated in sex, enjoyed love, shared pleasure with each other. One woman strangely described pornography as an activity of looking at the self. But perhaps that was because she had seen mostly heterosexual porno which, of course, features the female body under the male gaze. The British audience were reserved and a bit frightened since as one woman explained, they were all rather hidden, poor, and forced to simply survive in always cold and damp clime of London. Yet the very notions that Hammer represented in her films had opened up new ways of seeing for the various lesbians of 1981 or ‘82 in London.

    On the other hand, in Montreal, the women, as one of them put it, were all beautiful, quite intelligent, and knowledgeable, mostly in awe of Hammer, cajoling her to move there to be with them. Drinks in hand, these women moved more freely around a much larger space and speaking in both French and English had a much more sophisticated notion of who they were and what Hammer’s films meant to them, almost entirely positive, although the issue of sexual imagery did again arise momentarily, which when I think back would have been still somewhat shocking in 1982, although gay male porno was well established and had begun to cross over to more serious gay cinema already by that time. But this Montreal group seemed quite aware of the difference between Hammer’s representation of the body and the way the body was represented in pornography. 

   Sally Jane Black, on the Letterboxd site, wrote a fascinating commentary that began with Hammer’s appearance at the San Francisco event, the first paragraph of which is worth sharing. At one point, one of the women identifies herself as an epidemiologist studying sexually transmitted diseases, whose first question she generally asks, she jokes, was “who did you sleep with last night?” Taken a bit aback, Hammer suggests that she would be more interested in knowing what disease she had and how to get rid of it, although she wasn’t shy about admitting that she had had wonderful sex the night before the event. Black summarizes my feelings as well:

 

“The epidemiologist who studied sexually transmitted diseases was on the cusp of her whole world being turned upside down, I suspect, given the date of this release. It's a powerful phenomenon to witness someone whose future you know is going to radically change in a short period of time documented before that change comes. It has a similar feeling to when you look back at media about pandemics now; it feels different than it did in its original context. When this came out, the full extent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was not known nor even perhaps imagined. Her interview in this is brief and mostly irrelevant to my speculations; she charmingly engages with Hammer about sex and queer representation. It is very telling that she stated that the staff where she worked needed more education about queer experiences.”

 

     These small revelations of the time in which Hammer’s film was made—several of which appear throughout this short documentary—are what make this work so significant. It is as if looking back into a world and time when the LGBTQ issues, our rights and concerns we now take for granted, were at best fuzzy, undefined and at worst seemed improbable. These women, mostly in their 20s and 30s in the film, now in their 60s and 70s, lived as outsiders in countries (US, England, and Canada) filled with citizens mostly disapproving and even disgusted by their behavior. Barbara Hammer, who in this film is an attractive woman, died in 2019 at the age of 80.

      Once again, Black nicely capsulizes those feelings:

 

“The impact of seeing queer women in 1981…enthused about a rare instance of cinematic representation cannot be understated. Today, we have the Internet to help us dig through the constantly expanding history of queer cinema, but in 1981, independent showings or other fringe events were possibly the only way to see a Barbara Hammer film. We get to see queer people in queer spaces (temporary or not) watching cinema made for them, then dissecting it, responding to it, feeling it. … What I see is the time capsule, the fragments of a world in between Stonewall and ACT UP. It evokes a deep yearning for moments of sorority with other lesbians, dykes, and queer people in general, something that the past year has denied so many of us. It shows the spirit of these spaces where being queer or a woman was being celebrated instead of derided or controlled. That feeling alone is worth watching for.”

 

Los Angeles, March 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).