Barbara Hammer (born May 15, 1939) is an American filmmaker in the genre of experimental films.
Biography Hammer was born in Hollywood, California. She is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles with a Bachelor's degree in psychology. She also holds two Master's degrees from San Francisco State University, one in English literature and one in film. She also took postgraduate classes in the field of digital media.
Pleasure, Intimacy and Resistance in Barbara Hammer and Sandra Lahire
Beyond their differences, the cinematic poetics of Barbara Hammer and Sandra Lahire share the same radical question: how do we position the body in the struggles (and care) running through the intimate and the shared? This programme runs alongside the two Aula Xcèntric talks, aimed at the publics of Barbara Hammer (4 November) and the cinema of Sandra Lahire (18 November).
The time of the production of a work is traversed by a cloud of intuition, desires, inklings, finds, coincidences, expectation, recall and concepts. This selection of films refers to the thinking and desire that have come along with the latest production.
As part of Interlocking Dimensions: Eco-Art at the Deering Contemporary, 16mm Experimental Film Program is a free presentation of rare Avant-garde and experimental works from cinema history presented in their original 16mm film formats as part of The program features silent artist films by Stan Brakhage, Abigail Child, David Gatten, and Barbara Hammer. Free with RSVP. 3pm ET March 2.
Joseph Plateau, who invented the phenakistoscope, the first device capable of producing the illusion of a moving image from a sequence of still images, provided a definition of the persistence of vision in 1829. In his research into visual physiology, he described the effects of light stimuli and colors on the retina, determining their duration to equal one tenth of a second. Yet this value is not constant: it increases as the eye adapts to darkness, hence the sensation of movement which is characteristic of a film projection. Plateau thought that the eye sees at a rate of ten images per second and that, when they are superimposed, the brain links them into a single, continuous, moving image.
The optical printer, a device consisting of one or more projectors mechanically linked to a camera for copying film or creating special effects, is historically associated with industrial cinema. In experimental cinema, a series of women filmmakers appropriated this traditionally masculine tool to explore its relationship with the body, imagination and memory. This session includes an introductory talk on the use and history of the optical printer in experimental cinema by the researcher Julia Cortegana.
The five women filmmakers in this session see cinema as a total medium for awakening the senses. In this programme, life and domestic rituals or gestation periods gradually give way to the exploration of sensuality and sexuality, the unconscious and desire, or delirium and trance. Here, sensory experiences lead to the most ecstatic fantasies.
The cliché has it that in near death experiences we get to see our lives flash past us in a moment. Using the metaphors of water and walking, the films in this programme present different ways of visualizing the stream of thought and the concatenation of images in memory.
Regarded for decades as one of the monumental and iconic works of the historical American avant-garde, Stan Brakhage’s five-part Dog Star Man remains a defining and radically original work of independent cinema. Utilizing numerous inventive filmmaking techniques ranging from distortion lenses, multiple superimpositions, hyperkinetic editing, hand-painting, and even the physical collaging of materials onto the film strip, Dog Star Man employs a vividly subjective, hypnagogic vision following a mythic man’s ascent and struggle through the obstacles and vicissitudes of existence. Images of birth, death, nature, the cosmos, and the psyche gradually combine and coalesce over the course of the film’s 74 minutes with increasing intensity and complexity, resulting in a total cinematic experience that remains unique nearly sixty years after its initial making.
