Tender Fictions
Director：Barbara Hammer
Screenwriter：
Cast：
Producer：Barbara Hammer
Cinematographer：Barbara Hammer
Running Time：58mins
Region：USA
Year：1995
Language：English
Production Company：
SYNOPSIS
Pioneer lesbian-feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer constructs an autobiography before someone does it for her in this post-post-modern sequel to her 1992 award-winning documentary Nitrate Kisses.
Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker’s life of performances. She robs an American Express in Morocco with a Swiss army knife and accosts a shepherd in a field on International Women’s Day. Shirley Temple was the ideal by which Hammer’s ambitious mother measured her own Barbie, so Hammer tap dances on the the child’s star on Hollywood boulevard.
The stories will tug at your heart, the theory teases your intellect, and the fragile line between truth and fiction provokes you in this dense and hypnotic montage.
Director Biography
<p>Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 30 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. Her experimental films of the 1970’s often dealt with taboo subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm and lesbian sexuality. In the 80’s she used optical printing to explore perception and the fragility of 16mm film life itself. Optic Nerve (1985) and Endangered (1988) were selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials (’85,’89). Her documentaries tell the stories of marginalized peoples who have been hidden from history and are often essay films that are multi-leveled and engage audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. In February 2007, she was awarded a tribute and retrospective at the Chinese Cultural University Digital Imaging Center in Taipei, Taiwan sponsored by Women Make Waves Film Festival. In April, 2008, Diving Women of Jeju-do premiered at the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival where Hammer presented followed by a trip to Beijing where she showed her 1970 lesbian films to a Feminist Seminar and a new LGTQI Center.</p>
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