This was originally written for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Daily Bulletin, published October 14, 2019. The Japanese version follows—I translated it myself with a lot of input from my friend Noriko (who made it so I wasn’t embarrassed to submit it) and then the editors at the Daily Bulletin, who worked very hard to make it read well in Japanese. Very grateful to have such editors!
There was one part I changed in the Japanese version out of laziness that I always regretted: the first line in English said “after living with cancer.” In my first pass translation, my literal translation of that didn’t make any sense so someone suggested ガンとの戦い in the Japanese—I went along with it even though I knew Hammer had specifically rejected “battle” metaphors for her illness. Below, I switched the Japanese to a phrase that maybe still doesn’t make sense but which hopefully calls attention to itself as a reframing of the metaphors of battle/war/fighting which usually hide what cancer is.
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Barbara Hammer, pioneer of lesbian and feminist experimental filmmaking, died last March after living with cancer for thirteen years. As chair of the YIDFF ’95 jury and as a filmmaker whose work was frequently featured at YIDFF, this year’s festival honors her with a Special Invitation screening of two of her films, Sanctus (1990) and Nitrate Kisses (1992).
Hammer’s approach to her subjects, to sex, and to the body is direct in a way which sets her apart from many experimental filmmakers. While it would be a simplification to say her work is only about lesbianism, lesbian desire informs all of her work. This includes the goal of making clear things which have been hidden, which seems to come from a frustration with how lesbian desire and sex itself disappears from public view. Sex in film, and lesbian sex especially, is obscured with innuendo; even in “explicit” pornography, sex becomes a visual act, about looking rather than feeling. Hammer’s directness moves us via feeling rather than sight, emphasizing the sense of touch. Her breakthrough short Dyketactics (1974) is a two minute “lesbian commercial” which exposes the joy and simplicity of desire between women within the complex layering of images which would come to be one of Hammer’s trademarks.
Nitrate Kisses searches for the lost history of lesbian desire in Hollywood. The film represents one of the most queer forms of longing: the desire for past which you cannot see, but which you can feel. Queer people, similar to other minority groups, are in constant search of a place in history books which have written them out in favor of uncomplicated stories of straight desire. In LGBT communities, this process of digging up hidden histories is an important part of creating a shared history. The lost archival history of lesbians in Nitrate Kisses is mixed with images of lesbian sex, sexuality which is outside Hollywood film’s acceptable representation.
Making the invisible visible (or filming the unfilmable) is central to the experiment in Sanctus, the second of Hammer’s films being screened this year. Sanctus uses x-rays from the archives of Dr. James Sibley Watson to create a ballet of bodies from the inside out.
While serving as chair of the YIDFF ’95 jury, Hammer discovered the work of Ogawa Shinsuke and Ogawa Productions. She filmed the documentary Devotion (2000) on the work of Ogawa Pro as a filmmaking collective. Devotion feels like an outsider coming to a world not quite within her realm of understanding; instead, Hammer follows her own interests in collective filmmaking to investigate the community in ways which might not have been possible for those who had been embedded within it. The film is famous for its focus on the women of Ogawa Pro, where they slept, what meals they cooked for the men, their sex lives, and their own commitment and pride in the filmmaking process in which they were an essential but often invisible part.
For an artist so committed to exposing the body, cancer and dying were frustratingly obscured by metaphor and platitudes. The last era of Hammer’s work was committed to the direct exposure of the process of dying, in films such as “A Horse is Not A Metaphor” (2008), about her experience of chemotherapy, and “Evidentiary Bodies” (2017) which, in its intended form, is screened in a space with Hammer’s own medical scans on display. She became an outspoken advocate for the right to die through physician-assisted suicide. In her final lecture/performance The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety) at the Whitney Museum of Art in October 2018, she argued for the dignity of death as a part of life, one which should be governed by our own choices. “I prefer a conscious death. A death I can be proud of,” she said.
May her memory be a challenge to each of us to speak our desire out loud and to reach out and touch every part of life and death.
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レズビアンフェミニストの実験映画の先駆者であったバーバラ・ハマー監督は13年間に及ぶガンとの「一緒に生きていること」の末、今年の3月に亡くなった。YIDFF‘95の審査員長、YIDFF‘97コンペ作品の監督として付き合いも長かった山形映画祭は、『サンクタス』（1990年）と『ナイトレイト・キス』（1992年）というハマーの２作品を今回上映する。
多くの実験映画と違って、ハマー作品は、その対象、セックス、そして体の扱い方が直接的である。作品がレズビアンイズムとフェミニズムについてのものだと言えなくもないが、作品はレズビアン的欲望は肝心な部分である。一般的な映画の中にセックス・体・レズビアンがほとんど見えなくなるくらい隠されている。ハマーの直接さは映画を普通に「見る」ことより、映画ではあまりできない「触れる」ことで感動させる。初めて話題になった短編作品の『Dyketactics』（1974年）は「レズビアンのCM」として映像を重ねることによって、女性同士の欲望の単純さと喜びを表現した。
『ナイトレイト・キス』という作品はハリウッドのレズビアンの消えた歴史を探求している。この作品ではクイア（英語の”queer”が「変人」と「LGBT」の両方の意味がある）の懐かしさを表す。この懐かしさは「見えないのに感じられる」過去の懐かしさだ。セクシュアルマイノリティーの人々は、他のマイノリティーのように、マジョリティーだけが見える歴史の中に「自分がいた」ところをいつも探している。LGBTコミュニティーの中に、この消えたLGBTの歴史を探すことはコミュニティを作ることの大事な過程だ。『ナイトレイト・キス』では、ハマー監督はレズビアンの消えた歴史とレズビアンの性的な場面を混ぜ、ハリウッドの表現できることの「外」が見えるようにする。
見えないものを見えるように、あるいは撮影できないものを撮影することは『サンクタス』の実験において中心的なことだ。ジェームズ・シブリー・ワットソンという医者とアマチュア監督のレントゲンを使って、ハマー監督は体の中の映像で素晴らしい踊りを作った。
YIDFF‘９７で『テンダー・フィクションズ』が上映され、審査員の時と違い時間に余裕があるハマーは、小川紳介と小川プロの作品に出会う。そして映画集団としての小川プロについて『DEVOTION小川紳介と生きた人々』（2000年）というドキュメンタリーを作った。『Devotion』で、ハマーは集団において人ができないような映画集団の日常的な政治を探検する。この作品は特に小川プロの女性メンバーを可視化する。どこで眠ったのか、どんな料理を作ったのか、セックスはどうしたのか、と踏み込んだ質問に、小川プロの人々は一員としての誇りと傾倒をハマーのカメラの前で語る。
このような人生の全てを裸にする芸術家にとって、「ガン」と「死」が比喩と嘘に隠されることは悔しかった。ハマーの晩年の作品、ガンと死の過程と向き合い、世界にはっきりとみせた「A Horse is Not a Metaphor」（2008年）は化学療法の経験を描く。「Evidentiary Bodies」（2017年）という作品は会場の空間にハマーのCT画像が展示される。ハマーは、尊厳死と医者による死の幇助の運動者になってきた。2018年10月、ホイットニー美術館で最後の演技・公演を行なった。『The Art of Dying or Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety』のテーマで自分で選んだ死の尊厳を強く主張した。「意識のある死を望む。自慢できる死」と語った。
私たちもハマー監督のように自分たちの欲望を叫んで、人生と死のすべてと直接向き合い映画を観たり作ったりしようではないか。