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).

Dirk de Bruyn’s cinema has always revolved around trauma and abstraction. Much of his work can be seen as a form of cinematic investigation into the effects of trauma based on his own personal experience. This session presents three films from different periods by the Dutch-born Australian filmmaker that form part of his search for an experimental, reflective audiovisual language to bring together ideas related to the construction of the self, the body and memory.

Based on an imaginary philosophical conversation by Diderot, Michael Snow made this treatise on different ways of looking and listening in the cinema, adopting a tone of satire similar to that of the French encyclopaedist. This extensive work comprehensively addresses many of the perceptual problems raised by sound film.

George Kuchar materialized camp sensibility like no other filmmaker, with equal measures of precision and excess. Made on the fringes of both independent and avant-garde cinema, his hundreds of films and videos, of which this session features a selection, represent an essential chapter in the history of gay cinema and the beginnings of queer cinema.