‘Barbara Forever’ Sundance/Berlinale Review: Barbara Hammer and the Politics of the Body

I didn’t know the meaning of the word lesbian until I was 30,” Barbara Hammer says in several of the interviews quoted, along with excerpts from her own recorded materials, that form the audio backbone of this documentary celebrating the life of the experimental filmmaker. Hammer built a long and prolific career by documenting her lived experience as a lesbian woman and, later, her battle with cancer—a disease that claimed her life in 2019, at the age of 79. Part of that journey is revealed here.

Before reaching that point, Brydie O’Connor’s film explores Hammer’s earlier life. In the 1960s, she was married to a man with whom she traveled the world on a motorcycle, eventually settling—at the height of the hippie era—on land they purchased in Northern California. What initially seemed like a paradise gradually turned into something closer to a trap, as the restless Barbara found herself pushed into a kind of domestic, housewife role that never quite fit her. It was there, she recalls, that she first encountered the term “lesbian” and then realized how deeply it resonated with her own feelings. It was also there that she entered into a relationship with another woman and discovered that her sexuality found its true expression in that direction.

From that moment on, Hammer’s work would—often not without tension—bring together her interest in experimental cinema and her desire, almost her need, to portray her own experiences and those of other women during the era of so-called second-wave feminism. The documentary is composed almost entirely of archival material, much of it filmed by Hammer herself, often on Super 8: excerpts from her films, along with personal footage and unused material—outtakes that never made it into her finished works.

Drawing on this rich body of images, along with new material shot by O’Connor in the present—much of it featuring Florrie Burke, Hammer’s widow—Barbara Forever weaves its way through a filmography that initially circulated within the feminist and lesbian circles of the time. Early and much-debated works such as Dyketactics (1974) and Double Strength (1978) were largely devoted to showing the bodies of Barbara and her close circle of friends in various romantic and sexual situations, challenging both cinematic conventions and social taboos.

As her career evolved and her visibility grew, Hammer became, by the 1990s, a filmmaker whose work left a clear mark at Sundance, with films such as Nitrate Kisses. Along the way, Barbara Forever becomes not just an artistic portrait but a life story: a chronicle of professional choices, love affairs, artistic risks, and the personal and creative challenges Hammer faced over decades of work. By the mid-2000s, her illness would lead her to shift her aesthetic approach to some extent, but without ever abandoning her central interests in the exploration of bodies and in the tactile, material nature of cinema itself.

With the resurgence of feminism in its most recent wave, Hammer’s films—long admired by some and contested by others—have increasingly come to be regarded as classics. Her figure has become iconic: a point of reference, almost a godmother of American queer cinema in its least commercial form. Militant, creative, intellectually sharp, and at times contradictory, Barbara Hammer was a force of nature who needed cinema as a way to bear witness to her extraordinary and constantly evolving life. This film honors that life—and her revealing, deeply autobiographical body of work—with comparable intelligence and formal sensitivity.