Barbara Hammer | Place Mattes / 1987

out of touch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Hammer (director) Place Mattes / 1987 

 

Extraordinarily different from her more documentary lesbian films, Place Mattes from 1987 is a highly experimental work that explores the relationship between “reaching and touching,” of imagining and moving toward an objective reality and actually experiencing it and living within it. Even when we travel sometimes our body is not totally engaged in the spaces in which we move.

    For this work, evidently, Barbara Hammer traveled to Puget Sound, Yosemite Park, and the Yucatan Peninsula, taking flat color pictures of her visits. Against these flat mattes, she projected images of her torso, limbs, and feet, attempting to interact in a fragmented sequence of images of the natural world which she had visited.

     But because of the two planar subjects, both flattened and made two-dimensional through optical printing, despite the almost frenzied movement of the figure against the landscapes there is clearly no way for the two to actually meet up, for the body to fully “touch” the “landscapes.” And while the images are often of great beauty and fascination, particularly set against the brightly encouraging and forcefully moving sound score by Terry Setter, there is something absolutely frustrating about the film, as if—unlike most realist films—the light and image remain out of coordination, the body out of touch with the space of habitation.

     In short, Hammer visually expresses the common metaphor of the female’s place in society, a sense of displacement: despite all the frenzied attempts of women to enact fully with the world in which they live there is something in the very form and structure of social “machine” that prevents a fully satisfying interchange. As the artist’s own description summarizes the situation, “Her attempt to ‘touch’ nature is removed and blocked between figure and ground setups by the optical printer’s flatness of planes.” The result is a beautifully abstract work of disengagement.

      Ironically, given Hammer’s feminist perspective—although perhaps inevitable given the current structures within which women and lesbians are forced to function, in the domestic world of a restaurant—where we might expect a very different kind of “place mat”—Hammer is finally able to actually hold the menu, pick up the coffee cup, and touch the spoon, the knife, and fork. 

     But then we must remember what Gertrude Stein did with those very tender objects.

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).