A bored housewife in her late 20s, she came out as a lesbian and became a pioneer of queer cinema.
By Harrison Smith Harrison Smith Obituary writer Email Bio Follow March 27 at 9:02 PM Barbara Hammer, an artist whose experimental films on lesbian sexuality, women’s orgasms, menstruation and representation made her a pioneer of queer cinema, and who later turned to works that addressed her declining health and the fragility of the human body, died March 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 79.
Ms. Hammer directed more than 80 films and documentaries, including a trilogy of feature-length movies about LGBT history, and in recent years drew increasing recognition from the contemporary art world, with retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
“This reinforced my own outline of the body and became the mode of my lesbian aesthetic,” she added, “so that in my films I want the viewer to feel in their bodies what they see on the screen.” “It turned out she thought she might be coming out,” Ms. Hammer told the told the New Yorker in February. “I said, ‘Welcome, it’s not a bad place to go.’ ”
Ms. Hammer employed editing and optical techniques that were as unconventional as her subject matter, aiming her camera through color filters or a cut edge of shattered glass. She sometimes burned or punched through her celluloid, and often incorporated archival footage, calling herself “the Nancy Drew of lesbian archives.”
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