Tender Fictions
Barbara Hammer constructs an autobiography before someone else does it for her in this post-modern sequel to her 1992 cult documentary _Nitrate Kisses_. From her childhood spent being groomed to be the next Shirley Temple to her work as an activist and filmmaker, Hammer takes a wry look at her life and a changing world.
| Director | Barbara Hammer |
| Actor | Naomie Décarie-Daigneault |
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Tender Fictions opens with the statement “Construct an autobiography before someone does it for you”, signaling the central theme of the film: a construction of the self.
Hammer tackles this question head-on, in keeping with her playful, non-linear, and experimental approach, she chooses performativity, fabulation, and self-referentiality as a means to self-construction. Concocting an aural and visual collage comprised of photos of past and current lovers, quotes from feminist texts, home videos, interviews with family and friends, television programs and even citing her own films including footage from her earliest works from the late 1960s: Schizy, Death of a Marriage, Yellow Hammer, and Contribution to Light. Functioning as an open-ended archive: these images trace the development of her career and provide visual evidence of her life and work.
In an effort to restore a lost or neglected aspect of history, Hammer situates her own lesbianism within a complex amalgam of personal, cultural, political, and familial lore and thus produces an unmistakably key contribution to the construction of lesbian history.
“If I have put a “lesbian life” on the screen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is to have put an unfixed, transparent, morphing character as much influenced and made by the times in which she/he/we/I/you live as determined by illusory self-construction.” (Barbara Hammer, HAMMER!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life)
Bouchra Assou
Film programmer and archivist
English market developer at Tënk
-
Français
1h00
Language: Français -
English
1h00
Language: English
- Année 1996
- Pays United-States
- Durée 60
- Producteur Barbara Hammer
- Langue English
- Résumé court Barbara Hammer constructs an autobiography before someone else does it for her, taking an ironic look at her life and a changing world.
Tender Fictions opens with the statement “Construct an autobiography before someone does it for you”, signaling the central theme of the film: a construction of the self.
Hammer tackles this question head-on, in keeping with her playful, non-linear, and experimental approach, she chooses performativity, fabulation, and self-referentiality as a means to self-construction. Concocting an aural and visual collage comprised of photos of past and current lovers, quotes from feminist texts, home videos, interviews with family and friends, television programs and even citing her own films including footage from her earliest works from the late 1960s: Schizy, Death of a Marriage, Yellow Hammer, and Contribution to Light. Functioning as an open-ended archive: these images trace the development of her career and provide visual evidence of her life and work.
In an effort to restore a lost or neglected aspect of history, Hammer situates her own lesbianism within a complex amalgam of personal, cultural, political, and familial lore and thus produces an unmistakably key contribution to the construction of lesbian history.
“If I have put a “lesbian life” on the screen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is to have put an unfixed, transparent, morphing character as much influenced and made by the times in which she/he/we/I/you live as determined by illusory self-construction.” (Barbara Hammer, HAMMER!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life)
Bouchra Assou
Film programmer and archivist
English market developer at Tënk
-
Français
Duration: 1h00Language: Français1h00 -
English
Duration: 1h00Language: English1h00
- Année 1996
- Pays United-States
- Durée 60
- Producteur Barbara Hammer
- Langue English
- Résumé court Barbara Hammer constructs an autobiography before someone else does it for her, taking an ironic look at her life and a changing world.
