This meticulous documentary kicks off with what Barbara Hammer calls her second birth – becoming a lesbian -, and describing her initial interest in low-budget filmmaking. She was addicted to taking a camera everywhere to the point of becoming a nuisance. She recorded the intimate moments of her sexual, her romantic and her everyday life. Her physical body is reflected directly in her body of work. This gesture of radical documentation allowed Hammer’s work to persist for decades to come. These images aren’t just a diary. They serve as invigorating evidence of lesbian presence.
Hammer belongs to the second wave of the feminist movement. Sexual discovery and eroticism were the pillars of her early work. Hammer’s first films were deemed pornographic. American documentarist Byrdie O’Connor never sanitises Hammer’s relationship with nudity. The director allows Hammer to narrate her own story. The voiceover consists almost entirely of the voice of the protagonist. As a result, Barbara Forever feels almost autobiographical (in reality, Hammer passed away in 2019, long before the film was conceived, at the age of 79).
Hammer’s narration starts with her prolific distribution of erotic short films like Dyketactics (1974). Made in the ’70s and the the ’80s, Lesbian activists quickly embraced her first films. In the ’90s, her work begins to grow more self-reflective as she reckons with her own arthouse relevance. Her influence seeps into festivals such as Sundance. She then moves into her first feature length films. She released her two two most pivotal archive investigations: Nitrate Kisses (1993) and Tender Fictions (1995). In the 21st century, Hammer grapples with a cancer diagnosis and her mortality. Hammer’s work grows less concerned with narrative. She begins to experiment with abstract physical film manipulation. O’Connor tries to clearly separate these three chapters in Hammer’s life with the way she arranges the balance of new images, interviews and archive. Audiences react to these artistic reinventions with strong emotions
O’Connor is given a difficult task. How does one make a personal documentary about someone who spent her whole career turning her own life into historic material? Despite all of Hammer’s raw and unflinchingly honest footage, there’s still an unshakeable folklore around her. Barbara Forever has to reckon with this contrast, and how this traditional doc might come across as antithetical to Hammer’s mission.
The film serves as an efficient introduction to Hammer’s work. It never deviates from traditional tropes of biographical filmmaking. With an extensive runtime of nearly two hours, Barbara Forever becomes too informative and descriptive. Hammer consistently worked with archive. It’s not until the third act that the film begins to share Hammer’s enthusiasm for manipulating such media.. The first half of Hammer’s early work is presented plainly with an ambivalence. The film never risks reinterpretation, and it often distracts the radical politics of the time. The focus is almost entirely on the individual rather than the impact that her work made.
Ultimately, Barbara Forever is a detailed account of Hammer’s work, however it lacks heart and broader commentary on queer identity. O’Connor’s homage is well-intentioned and respectful, but it lacks the rebellious spirit of its protagonist.
Barbara Forever showed at Sundance and also in the Forum Special section of the 76th Berlinale
