A gently joyous and reflective journey through the life and work of pioneering experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, Brydie O’Connor’s illuminating and impressively structured film utilises 16mm, 8mm, video and digital from the Barbara Hammer estate to celebrate the work of a forthright filmmaker and to dwell on her considerable legacy.
As Hammer (who died in 2019) says early on in the documentary, “my life has been lived in film – I am creating a lesbian history in a world where we are invisible. A lesbian film is not going to follow a traditional story – it is going to mix up life.” And so, to an extent, O’Connor chooses to mix up this life story. While it largely follows Hammer’s life chronologically, it skips childhood and essentially begins when Hammer realised she needed to express herself as an artist, working with a Super 8 camera for the first time, aged 27.
Barbara came out in 1970 (‘not silent at all,” as she recalls) and the film reveals that the first woman she slept with was the lover of the woman who taught her the word “lesbian.” She turned the camera on herself and friends when she made Dyketactics in 1974, as she describes it, “the first lovemaking film to be made by a lesbian.”
Very much through her own images and words – interspersed with filmed conversations between O’Connor and partner Florrie Burke – the film focusses on Hammer and the various cultural ecosystems around her – from the feminist and queer movements in 1970s San Francisco, the male-dominated New York art world of the 1980s, the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s, and expanded LGBTQIA+ representation in art and culture in the 2000s.
It shows her frustrations at not being recognised my MOMA in New York as an experimental filmmaker of stature, given how important, ground-breaking and influential her work was for audiences.
At the film’s start, we see Hammer dipping into her collection of eighty films, as well as a vast collection of unreleased archival materials, hundreds of hours of footage, personal photographs and ephemera, and extensive audio interviews which are now deposited with Yale University. As she says, “it is more than my life – it’s a history of queer art.”
Barbara Forever does a fine job in examining how Hammer’s films break taboos around female sexuality, ageing, illness and queer love, where she often used her own body as a place for exploration and political power. But while politics is never far from the narrative, it is O’Connor’s sense of love and respect for Hammer and her work that shines through, and her subsequent film is resolutely personal. With so much material to draw on, O’Connor astutely makes the most of Hammer’s experimental visuals alongside audio and grainy archival footage, with Hammer’s smile, playful intelligence, cinematic verve and resolute determination illuminating a watchable and important film.
As Hammer says: “If we’re experimenting with our lives and the way we’re going to live, our film and our art should also be experimental. It breaks tradition, and makes you think in a broader way. It’s the way I experience the world.”
US, 2026, 102mins
Dir: Brydie O’Connor
Production: Space Time Films, Kartemquin Films
International sales: Cinetic
Producers: Brydie C’Connor, Elijah Stevens, Claire Edelman
Editor: Matt Hixon
Music: Taul Katz
