Riding and swimming in the river, in combination with Meredith Monk’s music, become symbols of the fight against ovarian cancer.
„Freedom is a horse galloping with mane and tail flying in the wind. Freedom is my eye and mind following the flow of expression through movement. Freedom is riding my horse on a trail exploring the unknown and seeing with fresh eyes as the world becomes new again. „A Horse Is not a Metaphor“ is about the power of living in the present to the fullest and with the greatest freedom.” (Barbara Hammer)

"'Bent Time' is influenced by scientists who have noted that light rays curve at the outer edges of the universe leading them to theorize that time also bends. A one-point perspective visual path across the US beginning inside a linear accelerator - or atom-smashing device - and travelling to such high-energy locations as the home of an ancient sun calendar in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; the site of Ohio Valley Mound cultures; the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges; and beyond. Inspired by this idea, I used an extreme wide angle lens of 9mm and "one frame of film per foot of physical space" to simulate the concept of time bending." (Barbara Hammer)

A Bolex camera between two women’s bodies seems to merge with them.
„Every frame in the film has an image of touching. Touch precedes sight in ontological human development and the connection of the two was an important aesthetic principal in my early films. The audience feels in their bodies what they see on the screen.” (Barbara Hammer)

The first “lesbian film” in film history

“Toward the end of the 80s the digital revolution was in full swing and I felt the imminent decline and possible death of 16 mm film, the medium I had chosen for my art. I went to the Galapagos Islands to mourn the loss of light through atmospheric pollution as well as the demise of film; I created this memento mori for the things I love.” (Barbara Hammer)

The term generations is also used to indicate the degree to which a film print is removed from the master. This is about film, the different stages of its development, about representations, and about two women of different ages. Barbara Hammer and the young filmmaker Gina Carducci both film the last days of Astroland on Coney Island with a Bolex. They post-produce and edit image and sound separately, Hammer using digital tools, Carducci on film, before they bring the two versions back together. An experiment about the traces of mortality in architecture, in film and in us – and how they give rise to something new.
– Grit Lemke

They wore pants when most women didn’t, they lived an openly lesbian life, were surrealist photographers and writers – and the only ones who had the courage to resist the German occupation of the Isle of Jersey: Lucie Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe aka Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. In this multilayered essay Hammer weaves disparate materials – interviews with contemporary witnesses, re-enactment, graphic elements, archival footage, letters and fictitious dialogues, often fragmented – into a delicate essay on the fragility of identities and the possibility of resistance.
– Grit Lemke

The encounter with the works of American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961) – marginalised during her lifetime – inspired Barbara Hammeras a filmmaker. Using interiors, articles of daily use and the architecture of places where Deren lived Hammer explores another piece of “hidden history”, an “archive of the mundane”, fragmented and with multiple superimpositions like our memory. Images from Deren’s films and of the filmmaker herself appear on the walls and in the rooms. Fleeting shadows like the stories told by witnesses which come from far away or from the walls and instantly turn into history. What traces are left by a life? “Nothing is first, nothing is last, nothing is future, nothing is past.“
– Grit Lemke

A pond metamorphoses into great ocean waves. Up and down, light and darkness, heaven and earth. An eternal circle – which the audience experience from inside.
– Grit Lemke

Everything is in flow – yet in swimming pools time seems frozen. A reflection on movement and stagnation.
– Grit Lemke

While Barbara Hammer was experimenting with film and light in the South of France in the footsteps of her beloved artistic avant-garde of the early 20th century, the Kosovo War broke out in 1998. She felt haunted by the images of refugees and began to investigate how artists like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard were able to continue painting the beauty of the landscape in the 1930s while a terrible war was raging and not far from them atrocities were committed. Embedded in a dialogue between the two painters, taken, among other things, from letters, Hammer questions witnesses, including relatives of Matisse, whose family was actively involved in the Resistance, or Lisa Fitko, who took Walter Benjamin across the Pyrenees. Benjamin’s tragic fate forms another focal point in this essay-collage of documentary material, pictures, animations and re-enactments whose levels – visual and textual – keep overlapping and where surfaces are painted, documents distorted and certainties challenged. Who tells the truth? How can art exist in times of war? And – what would I have done? Though this question is left unanswered, in the face of a global political shift to the right this film is clearly addressed to the artists of our present age and their positions in times of crisis.
– Grit Lemke

"A celebration of ancient pre-patriarchal standing stones, mounds, and circles including Stonehenge and Avesbury." (Barbara Hammer)