Atlantic Film Festival, Halifax, Canada,
Saturday, September 19 @ 1 p.m.
Queer Lisboa, Portugal, Saturday, September 19 @ 9:30 p.m.
Festival do Rio, Brazil, Oct. 1-14, TBA
MIX, Copenhagen, Oct. 2-11, TBA
Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Oct. 8-18, TBA.
Inside Out Ottawa, Canada, Oct. 24th/ 25th.
DIRECTOR : Barbara Hammer
Poet Elizabeth Bishop has gained notoriety as much for her tempestuous romance with Lota de Macedo Soares as for her poetry. While that affair inspired a book and a movie (Reaching for the Moon, Frameline37), this new documentary broadens the focus and puts the Lota affair in context. Frameline24 Award recipient Barbara Hammer (whose previous films at Frameline are too numerous to list!) creates a layered portrait of the person behind the poet, from her childhood in Nova Scotia to her death in 1979.
Bishop described herself as “timorously kicking around the coastlines of the world,” and the film is loosely organized around her stays in Nova Scotia, Key West, Brazil, and Cambridge—the homes she made for herself and the lovers she took. Never “out” as a lesbian—the concept would have been foreign to the writer who graduated from Vassar in the thirties—Bishop nonetheless actively pursued women, from her first summer-camp crush to the May-December romance that was her last affair.
Hammer examines Bishop from all angles, interviewing everyone from literary luminaries like Marie-Claire Blais and Edmund White to Lota’s aged former maid. Hammer pulls the viewer into Bishop’s world, blending present day footage of each location with archival photos, and recreating moments in the writer’s life. Throughout the film we hear Bishop’s own words, read by Kathleen Chalfant, revealing yet another facet of a complicated and passionate woman.
Barbara Hammer (b. 1939) has been making groundbreaking films for more than forty years. Often hailed as the creator of the queer cinema genre, and committed to the portrayal of the untold histories of women, Hammer has presented retrospectives of her work internationally, most recently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and the Toronto International Film Festival.
Maya Deren’s Sink
followed by Generations
Saturday, June 20, at 2:30 p.m.
2011, 30 minutes; 2010, in collaboration with Gina Carducci, 30 minutes
West Building Lecture Hall
Resisting Paradise
Sunday, June 21, at 4:00 p.m.
2003, 80 minutes
West Building Lecture Hall
My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities
preceded by Diving Women of Jeju-Do
Saturday, June 27, at 3:00 p.m.
2007, 25 minutes; 2001, 53 minutes
West Building Lecture Hall
Lover/Other
preceded by Tender Fictions
Sunday, June 28, at 4:00 p.m.
1995, 58 minutes; 2006, 55 minutes
Barbara Hammer in person
West Building Lecture Hall
www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/calendar/film-programs/aon-hammer.html
www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1581
Screening Hours
TUE, MAY 26, 7pm | WED, MAY 27, 4pm
THU, MAY 28, 7pm Filmmaker present
FRI, MAY 29, 4pm | SAT, MAY 30, 7pm
SUN, MAY 31, 5pm | MON, JUN 1, 7pm
With her latest work, Barbara Hammer, who is known for films about lesbian life, history, and sexuality that draw upon avant-garde tradition, examines the little-known aspects of the life of the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979). Hammer’s film, shown here in its New York premiere, explores Bishop’s inner life through some of the homes in which she lived and wrote—from childhood to her final days—and through the more private and sensorial poems that were published after her death. Featuring music composed and performed by the experimental singer and musician Joan La Barbara; Bishop’s intimate poems read by Kathleen Chalfont; three actors representing Bishop’s physical presence at different stages of her life; and interviews by historians, poets, and students, Welcome to This House sensitively portrays a complex, private, and challenging writer whose poetry continues to inspire.
Organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film.
Barbara Hammer’s WELCOME TO THIS HOUSE: A FILM ON ELIZABETH BISHOP
We are proud to announce that acclaimed director Barbara Hammer will be world premiering her new film on poet Elizabeth Bishop at the 31st Annual Boston LGBT Film Festival!
WELCOME TO THIS HOUSE (2015) is a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide “missing documents” of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poetry is beautifully performed by Kathleen Chalfant and with the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara brings Bishop into our lives with new ways and unexpected details
Tickets Available Soon:
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Friday, April 10th
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA
View on Google Maps
Phone: 617-369-3306
Have A Crush Jan 10–Feb 14, 2015
Lecture and Screening by Barbara Hammer Saturday, Feb 7, 7pm
Barbara Hammer will show six of her films related to the works on paper currently exhibited at KOW, and she will give insight in her artistic methodologies as a feminist filmmaker.
KOW BERLIN
Welcome To This House (2015) HD, 79 minutes, col/sd
Welcome To This House (2015) is a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide “missing documents” of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poetry is beautifully performed by Kathleen Chalfant and with the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara brings Bishop into our lives with new ways and unexpected details.
www.facebook.com/elizabethbishopthefilm
Welcome to This House (projected completion date 2014–15) is a feature-length essay documentary film about a great Modernist poet, Elizabeth Bishop, and her homes, life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self‐ disclosure.
The Guggenheim Foundation awarded Hammer a 2013 Fellowship in support of Welcome to This House.
www.gf.org/fellows/17405-barbara-hammer
American experimental filmmaker
June 12 to July 1, 2012
Since the early 1970s, Barbara Hammer has claimed the double identity of feminist and lesbian activist. Pioneer of queer cinema, she has gained an international reputation in the field of American experimental cinema.
From her earliest films (X, Dyketactics, Superdyke), her boldness is evident in the enthusiastic and lyrical exploration of sexuality and women’s pleasure, previously terra incognita in the geography of cinema. For this, it invents new formal representations of flower and plant outbursts (Women I Love) to a symbolic vocabulary close to Surrealism, revealing its proximity with Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun (I Was / Am I, Psychosynthesis) and two recent works (Maya Deren’s Sink and Lover Other: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore).
The creative energy of Barbara Hammer fires up all of the rich technical syntax of the avant-garde: superimposed layering of images, visual collage, coloring or alteration of the film, de-framing, use of solarized and negative film, and editing in post production to transform the movie into poetic form by manipulating the film before our eyes (Endangered). All these effects contribute to the technical deployment of a work rich in radiant colors and sounds more and more skillfully worked (Generations). Even in her many films shot in black and white, Barbara Hammer is a filmmaker of light and perceptual experiments. She is also highly attentive to the accompanying sound of her films: music and sound effects that give a color, a tone, sometimes lyrical and sometimes humorous, to films that accompany the memory they hold.
From the first shooting in super 8mm, she films alone or with her friends, making public the most private chapters of her life. Parallel to the personal films are works of memory archives and hidden lesbian and gay histories, forming a trilogy: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fiction (1995) and History Lessons (2000).Her work evolves over time: in 2000, she filmed Devotion in Japan about a kind of “community” of filmmakers centered around a charismatic producer, and Resisting Paradise in 2003, which questions “how to be an artist in during war?” In 2007, she made a documentary about women divers from the Korean island of Jeju-Do, South Korea. In 2011, her latest film is a tribute to the filmmaker Maya Deren which she made after finishing in 2008, a painful movie A Horse Is Not A Metaphor where her fight against cancer is assisted by her of love of energy and life both intimately connected to the beauty of nature.Jeu de Paume website
This video clip was produced by the Jeu de Paume’s online magazine. ©Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2012