‘Barbara Forever,’ Review: Thrilling Doc Puts ‘Body’ in ‘Body of Work’

Of all the retrospectives and surveys I’ve seen, most have stimulated my eyes and my mind; a few have even involved using my ears. (There’s a reason what’s presented in museums is often called “visual art,” after all.) But the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s 2018 Barbara Hammer retrospective remains a standout because it demanded more of my body than a typical exhibition.  

I’m thinking of Hammer’s 1982 film Pond and Waterfall, which mostly depicts a rippling pond and the submerged plants beneath its surface. At the Leslie-Lohman, the piece was presented alongside a stethoscope that viewers were invited to use. I remember placing it to my chest and hearing my heart thump as Hammer’s camera sucked in green trees and sun-dappled water. It was the first time I’d ever produced my own soundtrack to an artwork. 

Pond and Waterfall is a wonderful, if underappreciated, work within Hammer’s oeuvre. It contains no nudity or explicit depictions of erotic encounters, both staples of her films of the 1970s, which are now considered landmarks of experimental queer cinema. But I think it speaks to Hammer’s career-long exploration of the body, which she provocatively showed could never be disentangled from one’s experience of art. 

At the time Pond and Waterfall was made, many artists and filmmakers would have disagreed with her on that count. She seemed not to care. In Barbara Forever, an exquisite new documentary by Brydie O’Connor, there’s even old, grainy footage of Hammer essentially saying as much before a screening of her films. “I want this screening to be tactile,” she tells the audience. “I want you to see and feel the images that are on the screen.” 

You can see and feel Hammer’s images in Barbara Forever, which begins its theatrical run this Friday. In fact, nearly all of O’Connor’s film consists of Hammer’s tactile images, accompanied by voiceover from the artist, who died in 2019: shots of labia superimposed over arid canyons (Multiple Orgasm, 1976); images of naked women dancing and engaging in mysterious rituals (Dyketactics, arguably Hammer’s most famous work, 1974); Hammer suggestively sticking a finger in her mouth and gazing into a mirror as she and a lover look on (Nitrate Kisses, 1992). 

O’Connor’s portrait of Hammer is not a traditional documentary. Its telling of Hammer’s life begins with her coming out as a lesbian in the ’70s, rather than with her birth, which is not mentioned until more than halfway through the film. There are no talking-head interviews with curators, scholars, or artists, and minimal contextualization of Hammer’s work within the broader narrative of 20th-century art history. 

That might make Barbara Forever a difficult introduction for Hammer initiates. But O’Connor’s documentary compellingly reanimates Hammer, whose films always demonstrated a keen awareness of mortality—especially in her later years, when her struggle with ovarian cancer began to inform her art. 

One thread of Barbara Forever is indeed devoted to the very notion of permanence. Hammer’s legacy has been preserved at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, which holds her archive. In the opening scenes, Hammer’s partner, Florrie Burke, gazes into a vitrine at an outfit worn by Hammer: a jacket emblazoned with the words “HOT FLASH.” “It’s more than my life,” Hammer says on screen in footage filmed before her death. She’s shown putting her films and documents into boxes that threaten to take over a room in her New York apartment. “It’s a history of queer art.” 

Hammer’s contribution to that history started during the mid-’70s, not long after she embarked on a new life as a lesbian in the Bay Area. She had been married to a man beforehand, and had begun a career as an artist and a filmmaker during her union. She had never studied art or cinema before she made her first work, Schizy (1968–72), a film featuring blurry visions of a cabin, its woodland surroundings, and cobwebs running across its windows. Hammer achieved the hazy effect by placing her bifocals in front of her camera, effectively drawing a comparison between her eye and her lens. 

She officially came out in 1974. “Touching another woman’s body, it changed my life,” Hammer says in voiceover in Barbara Forever. “It had to be shown.” And she did just that, portraying lesbian sex through montages of bodies tumbling across each other. Breasts are caressed and thighs crisscross; kisses are planted, and occasionally there’s a glimpse of something more graphic. Hammer recalls in Barbara Forever that her first lesbian experience “reinforced my own outline of my body.” One imagines that making her early films offered similar revelations for the artist. 

Hammer, who moved to New York during the ’80s to be part of what she here calls “the art capital of the world,” described these films as a reaction to what she did not see represented in structural filmmaking and Minimalism, two of the dominant artistic modes of the era. No surprise, then, that mainstream institutions showed little interest in her films and early performances. 

The Museum of Modern Art rejected her films because of their depictions of lesbian lovemaking, Hammer claimed in an archival recording included by O’Connor. (The museum now owns nine of her works, and recently used one of them to advertise an exhibition about the body and art.) Meanwhile the National Endowment for the Arts effectively shut her out, Hammer added, declining to give her funding. Her fortune evidently changed in 1987, when curator John Hanhardt included her in the Whitney Biennial. 

Today, her place within the art world is more secure: Her estate has two commercial representatives, Company Gallery and KOW; she appeared in three more Whitney Biennials; and the Whitney even included her in last year’s “Sixties Surreal,” which offered an alternate version of 1960s art history that wasn’t centered around Pop and Minimalism. But Barbara Forever is less concerned with her rise in museums and galleries than it is with tracing her influence on younger generations and other queer artists. 

It features footage of Hammer screening one of her films—one of the few kid-appropriate ones—for a class of gleeful schoolchildren who find it “strange,” as one student puts it. And it also features documentation of a workshop taught by Hammer in which she instructs attendees in how to hold a camera. “If you put your elbow into your hip,” she says, pushing her Bolex into her body and bobbing up and down, “you’re really located.” The “into” is telling: Her art was not just an extension of her body but a part of it, too.