RENOWNED FILMMAKER BARBARA HAMMER TO SCREEN AND DISCUSS WORK AT PURCHASE COLLEGE

Barbara Hammer (American, b. 1939) is an award-winning, avant-garde filmmaker who is celebrated as a formative figure of feminist and queer cinema.

Hammer, who has directed over 80 films throughout her 40-year career and continues to be a leading filmmaker, will screen some of her short films and clips of her features as well as read from her recent biography, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Life and Sex, in the Purchase College Music Building, Film and Choral Hall, on Wednesday, Nov 2, at 7 p.m. The timely lecture follows in the footsteps of her recent retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Reina Sophia in Madrid, and the Tate Modern in London.

The free screening, presented in conjunction with the GenderF**k Film Festival organized by TransAction, is co-sponsored by the college’s School of Film and Media Studies and the SUNY Purchase Events Brigade, with special support provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The AMPAS institutional grant will bring several successful independent filmmakers to Purchase College throughout the year to speak to students, faculty, and the public about their films and their experiences in the industry.  

Throughout her varied work from the 1970s to the present, Hammer has problematized the aesthetic and political representation of the marginalized, the outsider, or as Hammer would say, “the lesbian who is an expatriate in her own country.”

For Hammer, the problem is the lack of representation, the invisibility of lesbian sexuality and life – an invisibility for which the cinematic off-screen space functions as a metaphor for “the things that happen behind the locked door, the double résumé, the hidden, the unsignified.”  Regarding her film Dyketactics (1974), the first film to embrace explicitly lesbian sexuality, she said, “We discovered who we were as we stepped into the void, the invisible, the blank screen, and named ourselves ‘lesbian.’ That was the first step.”

Offering studies in new media, video art, and production training in filmmaking in a shared core curriculum, the School of Film and Media Studies at Purchase College, SUNY integrates production and critique of the media that shape contemporary life. 

Purchase College, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) network of 64 universities and colleges, was founded in 1967 by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His aspirations for Purchase were to combine on one campus conservatory training in the visual and performing arts with programs in the liberal arts and sciences. Today, Purchase College, SUNY is a community of students, faculty, and friends where open-minded engagement with the creative process leads to a lifetime of intellectual growth and professional opportunity. For more information about the College, visit www.purchase.edu.