In the seventies, Barbara Hammer was a pioneer in exploring radically lesbian and feminist themes, sensibilities and forms in cinema. Along with films that document the struggle for the political, psychological and sexual emancipation of women, her cinema takes the body (her own and that of friends, colleagues and lovers) as a starting point for empathetic, affirmative and intensely lyrical meditations on intimacy and lesbian pleasure (as in Sync Touch and Double Strength), and female communities (which in Sappho take the mythological form of collective prayer). By way of an intermission in the session, the reactions of different spectators to Hammer’s films, documented in Audience, consider whether the cinema can be a space for recognition, contact and shared desire.

In the Conservative England of the 1980s and ‘90s, Sandra Lahire also worked with her own body to expose the polymorphic violences of the capitalist patriarchy. Her first film, Arrows, is an eclectic exploration of anorexia and the obsessive awareness of the body’s fragility, while Night Dances adapts Sylvia Plath’s poem of the same name to create a meticulous musical montage that evokes the spectral nature of death, family, religion and love. An excerpt from an unfinished project by Lahire, Eerie is the briefest evocation of an interplay of glances and desires.

Sappho, Barbara Hammer, 1978, 16 mm, 7 min; Sync Touch, B. Hammer, 1981, 10 min; Double Strength, B. Hammer, 1978, 15 min; Audience, B. Hammer, 1983, 32 min; Arrows, Sandra Lahire, 1984, 16 min; Night Dances, S. Lahire, 1995, 16 min; Eerie, S. Lahire, 1992, 1 min

Digital screening, original version with Catalan subtitles. Copies of Hammer courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, and copies of Lahire by LUX, London.

A programme by Carlos Saldaña with contributions by Mireia Montané.