16MM RUN
Bette Gordon, Barbara Hammer
#Agora
16MM RUN, the experimental film programme in collaboration with Villa Lontana returns on Wednesday 23 October, at 7 pm, with screenings of Women I Love (1976, 22’39‘’) and No Nooky T.V. (1987, 12‘’) by Barbara Hammer and Empty Suitcases (1980, 48’75‘’) by Bette Gordon.
Barbara Hammer, Women I Love, 1976, 22’39’
Stills from Women I Love. Courtesy the artist and Light Cone.
Stills from Women I Love. Courtesy the artist and Light Cone.
Women I Love is a series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker’s friends and lovers intercut with a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature. Culminating footage evokes a tantric painting of sexuality sustained. Each lover is compared with a colorful flower, or a fruit or vegetable peeling open from its core in animated pixilation. Using double-exposure, out-of-date stock, the relationships are portrayed with a strong sense of the romantic. The lovers’ identities are never presented; rather the women are objectified and idealized. The film form tells us much about “lesbian lifestyle”; the relationships are clearly delineated yet it seems the traces of one relationship’s failure are repeated in the next.
Barbara Hammer, No No Nooky T.V., 1987, 12’
Stills from No No Nooky TV. Courtesy the artist and Light Cone.
Stills from No No Nooky TV. Courtesy the artist and Light Cone.
Using a 16mm Bolex and Amiga computer, Hammer creates a witty and stunning film about how women view their sexuality versus the way male images of women and sex are perceived. The impact of technology on sexuality and emotion and the sensual self is explored through computer language juxtaposed with everyday colloquial language of sex. No No Nooky T.V. confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that pokes fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age.
Bette Gordon, Empty Suitcases, 1980, 48’75’’
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
Courtesy the artist and New American Cinema Group
«Empty Suitcases is a narrative derived from film’s own material and the my concern for exploring issues of representation and identification in cinema. The film presents fragments of a woman’s life–her work as a photographer, her friendship and relationships; in short, her economic, sexual,and artistic struggles. By deconstructing the fragments of text, speech, music and picture, the film forces focus on the workings of narrative, as well as on the narrative itself. Central to Empty Suitcases is women’s inability to place and define themselfs in laguage and politics, the location of radical struggle. This displacement leads to a definition of woman as other, and reveals problems of unresolved sexual relations, difference, and violence» (Bette Gordon). According to J. Hoberman (Village Voice), her most successful sequences – a militant ‘new wave’ fashion show in which models photograph themselves, an expressionless white woman lipsynching alog to Billie Holliday, a scene where the filmmaker relates a dream only to be drowned out by Talking Heads singing ‘Psycho Killer’ – all criticize conventional modes of representation, with particular attention to what current academic jargon calls ‘the imaging of woman’.
Free admission until capacity is reached.
With the support of Fondazione Dino ed Ernesta Santarelli.
Feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema, BARBARA HAMMER (1939-2019) made over 90 moving image works as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages and drawings. In the early 1970s Hammer studied film at San Francisco State University. After seeing Maya Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon, she was inspired to make experimental films about her personal life. After coming out as a lesbian she “took off on a motorcycle with a super-8 camera” and in 1974 filmed Dyketactics, widely considered to be one of the first lesbian films. Hammer sought to deconstruct and disempower the narratives and structures that oppress women in general and lesbians in particular. From her earliest experimental work, her films are playfully and relentlessly challenging of accepted norms and taboos. In 1992 Hammer released her first feature film, Nitrate Kisses—an experimental documentary exploring the repression and marginalization of LGBT people since the First World War. Hammer continued making specifically history-based films for a number of years, including Tender Fictions, History Lessons, My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities, Resisting Paradise and Lover/Other—exploring issues important to her own identity and to those of other artists and lesbians. When Hammer was diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer in 2006, she began exploring life lived with cancer in her films and performances. Her award-winning 2009 film, A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, is a celebration of her love of life despite the difficulties. In the last decade of her life, Hammer was given retrospective exhibitions in several internationally major museums and in 2017 her paper archive was acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Hammer also established the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant—awarding the first grant in 2017.
A pioneer in the American Independent Film world, BETTE GORDON (1950, USA) is best known for her bold explorations of themes related to sexuality. Her early short films, most notably Empty Suitcases, won numerous awards and Festival acclaim worldwide, including showings at the Berlin International Film Festival, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Biennial. Variety (1984) marked her debut as a feature film director, particularly in light of the film’s invitational showing at The Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight. Bette Gordon has collaborated extensively with James Benning in the 70s on films such as The United States of America (1975), Michigan Avenue (1973) and i-94 (1974). Gordon holds a BA, MA, and MFA from The University of Wisconsin – Madison and is now a part of the film department of Columbia University School of the Arts. Some of her films are now part of permanent collections in several different museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.