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Beth Mauldin talks with a lesbian film documentarian: Lesbian Images in the Classic Film Era
Barbara Hammer has produced some seventy documentaries in her thirty-plus years as a filmmaker. Among them are Nitrate Kisses and Tender Fictions, both of which were featured at the Sundance Film Festival, among other film festivals in the U.S. and abroad. Last year, Ms. Hammer was awarded the prestigious Frameline Award for outstanding contribution to lesbian and gay cinema. Her recently released documentary History Lessons presents a montage of lesbian images in popular culture, especially the movies, from the 1920's to the 1960's.
Beth Mauldin: Where did you come up with the idea for History Lessons and where did you find this incredible footage?
Barbara Hammer: I've been working on a trilogy of gay and lesbian history since 1990. Nitrate Kisses was my first feature documentary. You could call it an essay film, a film about ideas. It's about the invisibility of gay and lesbian history from about the 1930's up to the present. I shot it in Germany, England, France, and the United States. There are stories about lesbians in concentration camps, about women in New York who used to be arrested if they didn't wear two pieces of underwear. (Butches would sew lace onto their butch panties.) The film ends with Joan Nestle urging gays, lesbians, bi's, and transpeople to save whatever love letters we have, snapshots -- anything about our lives so we will never have this invisibility about our lives again. There will be an archive, a library.
I realized then that I should make a film about my life, because I had already been working almost thirty years and made seventy films or so. What about my own archive? So I made a film called Tender Fictions, a lesbian autobiography. After that I thought, What area of lesbian and gay history have I not shown? That was material before Stonewall, from the beginning of film in 1869 -- from Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers, Méliès, Pathé-Cinéma -- to Stonewall in 1969. Of course, this was the big missing history, and I think the reason that nobody had thought of making it was because it was all negative history. It was all made by men, for...