Overview
- A much-needed account of the early works of pioneering lesbian feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, grounded in archival research and interviews with Hammer herself
- Situates Hammer’s films within the American feminist, queer, and avant-garde visual cultures of the 1970s, arguing that all three aspects are essential to understanding her work
- Identifies important themes of embodiment, materiality, relationality, and performance in Hammer’s early filmmaking
Part of the book series: Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image (EFAMI)
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About this book
Barbara Hammer in the Seventies: Or, What a Body Can Do addresses the intersection of experimental film, lesbian sexuality, and the women’s movement in Hammer’s early films. Grounded in an embodied, sexual, and gendered positionality, these films interrogate the politics of visibility and identity and perform a discontinuous repertoire of lesbian images that resist the medium of film’s established constraints and the decade’s broader systems of signification.
Hammer’s films offer a critique of the dominant discourse that privileges the discreteness and self-sufficiency of the individualistic human subject. By performing the (lesbian) body in its ‘environment’—in erotic and communal relation to other bodies—and staging the relation of human bodies with the materiality of non-human beings and objects, they create a site of intervention into the humanist project, as it informs film studies, feminism, and queer theory.
This rereading of Hammer’s work offers an important contribution to conversations between feminism and queer studies. In remembering the feminist origins of queer studies, it recenters political and ethical questions such as the fundamental relationality of the subject, the subject’s dependency on others, and the resulting ethical responsibility for and towards the other.
Keywords
- Barbara Hammer
- experimental film
- avant-garde film
- feminist film
- lesbian cinema
- queer cinema
- 1970s film
- art film
- performance theory
- relationality
- embodiment
Reviews
“Spinoza argued that it does not matter, what a body is, but what it can do. In her sisterly recapitulation of Barbara Hammer's early work, Krystyna Mazur builds a lesbian materialism rooted in theories of the queer and feminist avant-garde, lesbian herstories and themstories, as well as in history of experimental cinema and video art. Following the best traditions of queer-feminist-lesbian theory and friendship, this book leads us through the background and the frames of the first lesbian filmmaker, whose work once performed a "new partition of the sensible", opening the public to the not earlier expressed experiences of women's sexual bodies seen away from the hegemonic male gaze. This is an excellent study of an artist, a lesbian activist, a filmmaker and an avant-garde artist.” (Ewa Majewska, author of “Feminism Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common”)
“In this fantastic book, Krystyna Mazur gives Barbara Hammer’s vital films of the 1970s the close and sustained theoretical engagement regularly given to the structural films of her male peers. Mazur's approach is wide-ranging yet rooted in feminist phenomenology, and it builds brilliantly on Hammer’s own theoretical understanding of her project. May these exuberant, queer, and hugely influential films never be marginalized again!” (Greg Youmans, author of “Word Is Out. A Queer Film Classic”)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Krystyna Mazur received her MA from the English Department of the University of Warsaw and her PhD from Cornell University. Her first book, Poetry and Repetition: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, was published by Routledge in 2005 as part of the series Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. Her major research interests include U.S. literature, American studies, queer studies, and film studies.
.Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Barbara Hammer in the Seventies
Book Subtitle: Or, What a Body Can Do
Authors: Krystyna Mazur
Series Title: Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-59694-0Due: 08 February 2025
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-59697-1Due: 08 February 2026
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-59695-7Due: 08 February 2025
Series ISSN: 2523-7527
Series E-ISSN: 2523-7535
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 361
Number of Illustrations: 20 illustrations in colour