Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Still Point

    “‘Still Point’ serves as Barbara Hammer’s definitive reassessment of 70’s cultural feminism. She literally places side-by-side the romantic image of her companion walking and stretching under the sun in a landscape and the gritty realism of a methodical garbage picker on the street of New York city, pushing a shopping cart and moving on to the next waste container. Our world view must encompass both realities, the film indicates. Privilege can’t obscure vision.” – Chick Kleinhans, The Film/Video Showcase Presents the Films of Barbara Hammer

  • Storytelling

    This award-winning film features performances by master storytellers telling tales which together outline the trajectory of a lifespan, from creation, birth, heroic adulthood, to death and regeneration. The stories are inter-cut to effect an almost Proppian analysis of narrative and to suggest an alternative position for women as producers and heroes of culture.

  • Striptease

    This is a documentary which treats the subject in terms of work, performance and sexuality. In striptease as in dominant cinema, women are presented as sexual spectacle, silent objects to be looked at. This film presents the dancers as speaking subjects, constructing a job profile from the point of view of the women who do the work.

  • Bent Time

    “A visual trip across the U.S. using an extreme wide angle lens that bends time to the edges while Hammer shoots one frame per foot of visual space traversed. The film’s length, 22 minutes, matches the time it takes sunlight to traverse a petroglyph of nine circles inscribed in rock at Ohaco Canyon, New Mexico. The film opens and closes with shots of this process and the minutes between take us from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate. “Hammer concentrates on the condensation of space and time at high energy locations, from the rock passageways of Ohaco Canyon to…

  • Surviving Memory

    “Surviving Memory” is a film about the role of loss in the formation of identity. It is a narrative intercut with documentary fragments of political actions, which connect the various characters to event through collective memory. Through autobiographical spoken texts, the narrator relays fragments of a relationship between two Jewish women. The fragmented texts speak of the relation between these women as well as recounting various past and contemporary historical events of fascist and neo-Nazi activity (and resistance), Lesbian/Gay rights, Pro-Choice and AIDS demonstrations. While these instances tell a personal/political story about loss, they are also meant to elucidate the…

  • Suspicious

    “An energetic video exploring the theme of self-identification and the significance of sexual and racial labels.” – Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film & Video Festival, Toronto, 1995

  • Swim After Dinner

    “Swim After Dinner” is an expression of a modern woman’s identity created through movement, sound, and metaphor. Swimming after dinner will give you cramps.

  • Tales from the Vienna Woods

    “Tales from the Vienna Woods” looks at a 19th-century romance through the courtship letters of a suitor. He writes of the role of women, money, clothes, shoes, keys, marriage – in short, all the preoccupations of his life. Among these, what is normal is debatable, not only for today’s society, but also for the society of the period. Through found images and period photographs, the setting shifts from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the 20th century, ending with Hitler’s Germany. This is a collage film which combines slide projections and live footage against musical variations on a famous Viennese waltz.

  • Telephone Film, The

    “Not enough attention is paid to photogenic objects. A telephone receiver, for instance…” Louis Delluc. The inability to communicate leads to Atomic disaster. Discount to Peace Groups.

  • Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax)

    “Parallax is the apparent change in position of an object resulting from the change in direction or position from which it is viewed.” Confusion, underlying meaning, and unspoken truths are often associated with the dialectic of sexual communication. Mingled with the intensity and unpredictability of a “one night stand,” they generate unique sensations – mixed emotion, risk, excitement. The film employs formal devices in a manner which is simple yet effective. Its subject matter – sexuality and communication – gains depth and poignancy through the artist’s decision to shoot the film’s three scenes for projection in a double-screen configuration, providing…