Why are there some people who do not appear in History? Who writes History? Taking these questions as her starting point, Barbara Hammer composed Nitrate Kisses (1992) using lost or forgotten files and Super-8 material that she filmed as she travelled around Germany, Berlin and Paris. The filmmaker reveals an unknown queer eroticism, investigates the repression of homosexuals under the Third Reich and brings together the experiences of older lesbians to incorporate sexual and emotional dissidences that have been suppressed from official historiography.
“Construct an autobiography before someone does it for you”, she says at the start of Tender Fictions, in which she relates her childhood—as the next Shirley Temple—and the break from her assigned role as an American middle-class woman to construct a new subjectivity as a lesbian, while coming into contact with feminist movements. With a polyphonic collage of her own material (letters, photographs, books) and archives, Barbara Hammer’s confessional and essayistic writing explores a fragmentary, multiple, nonlinear identity woven of affects, sensations and pleasure.
Barbara Hammer: Nitrate Kisses, 1992, 16mm, 67 min.; Tender Fictions, 1995, 16mm, 58 min.
16mm screening, original version with Catalan subtitles.
Copies recently restored by the Academy Film Archive of Los Angeles. Thanks to The Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix.
