Barbara Hammer | Dyketactics / 1974

back to basics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Hammer (director) Dyketactics / 1974 [4 minutes]

 

If there are any obvious “tactics” displayed in the 4 minutes that make up Barbara Hammer’s groundbreaking film of 1974, it is to put the female body wholly on display for all to see, love, and admire.

 

    The film surely dates itself in some of its early hippie-like nonsense, when women gather together in an open space in the nude, at one moment joining in a kind of Delsartean ring-round-the-rosy which, even if it may be joyful, is also today quite humorous—perhaps as Hammer intended it.

      But there is much else going on in these frames as well that had never quite been expressed this way on film before. Critic and Hammer admirer Whitney Pow describes it as a four-minute long depiction of “images that evoke tactile sensations: fingers running through blades of grass, legs walking through fields, hair blown by gusts of wind, bodies intertwining in the orange sunlight.”

      It debuted at San Francisco State University where, Hammer remembered in a Bomb magazine interview, the response was generally positive. But the last few scenes. the most serious and controversial I would argue, where the lesbian couple actually make love was far more controversial, as it was evidently even to the film festival goes of her 1982 film Audience.

      These scenes, although often touted as the first full lesbian sex scene on film, actually appeared decades after the early porno films I’ve reviewed in these volumes such as Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920), Women’s Workshop (1921), Abbot Bitt at the Convent (1925), and School Spanking (1925) which contained extensive lesbian and male gay sex; yet it does represent, perhaps, the first non-pornographic depiction of women engaged in sexual activities. And that is a truly important distinction to be made, the fact that while, as Rizvana Bradley observes, “For Hammer as for the viewer, it is the texture, grain, and feel of queer nakedness that draws us into and beyond the film’s frame. She opens film to the body itself. In Dyketactics, we sense the balmy heat of that nakedness, which Hammer visually regards as an embroidered surface that augments and extends queer modes of viewing pleasure”; it is not titillation or arousal she seeks as in pornography but in a serious engagement with the female body.

      Evidently on the first showing, particularly with the exposure of Hammer’s vagina. one man screamed out in seeming horror. The women in the audience responded: “Haven’t you see that before?”

 

     Pow cleverly responds: “Judging from his reaction, maybe this guy was Freud (“Nothing’s more uncanny than a vagina!” he once wrote, my paraphrase). The shock of seeing a woman’s body on screen, uncensored by a mainly male-regulated media, was likely astonishing; the camera being unflinchingly aimed at a lady’s “nether bits” as opposed to widely-acceptable boob shots was surprising. There were probably lots of dudes screaming at vaginas that day, and Hammer’s film seemed to point at them and go, ‘This is my body. Fuck you.’”

      Hammer herself writes: “Dyketactics … is not made with the Freudian belief that the sublimation of erotic energy into creative pursuits is the only hope of a civilized society,” she writes. “Freud’s belief is apparently proven wrong by the secularly repressive, capitalistic, obsessive, chauvinistically oppressive world we know.”

      With this short film, Hammer brought the true center of the LGBTQ experience back into focus, the body and sex itself.

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).