Barbara Hammer | Tourist / 1985

gaze and desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Hammer (director) Tourist / 1985

 

In the short collage-manipulated 4-minute film film Tourist, Barbara Hammer treats the average tourist almost as video arcade game that has gone out of control, costing larges sums of money for the momentary pleasures of gawking and the click of the camera (represented of rolls of hanging films) in its owner’s gaze. The “tour” moves from Bermuda, to Britain, to France, and Holland with quick snippets of the beach, gardens, the Eiffel Tower, and windmills, the standard tourist images.

 

    Yet there is something beyond the tourist’s gaze of mere images. As the central character walks along a lonely county road, we see images of the words “gaze” and “desire,” and realize that there is also the tourist’s loneliness and desire for company. And indeed, in a sped-up tape, which makes the figure sound like she’s on helium, a voice suggests, “I’d like to walk along with you,” as a pair of boots (harkening a bit to Eleanor Antin’s famed tourists of 100 Boots), who joins the traveler, introducing music and other activities than mere sight-seeing.

      But in the end, the tourist seems to be racing away from even the company she sought, running on a beach, tired perhaps of the spectacle which the voyage has become. As Kathleen Hulser summarizes in “Frames of Passage: Nine Recent Films of Barbara Hammer,” the “Psychic desires of ‘tourists’ permeate the architecture of seeing.” Perhaps what we see depends upon who is accompanying us on the trip. A lover surely makes a world of difference.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).