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Queer Art, Feminist Film
Re-interpreting revolution with Barbara Hammer
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The last event of the Queer/Art/Film series at the IFC Center brings us Barbara Hammer and Born In Flames. During this series the IFC has presented us with queer cinema pioneers on the last Monday of every month, beginning the evening with a screening of the chosen film followed by a talk by the artist.
Barbara Hammer’s choice of Born In Flames, Lizzie Borden’s most well-known work, took the women’s film festivals by storm in 1983 as well as winning the Reader Jury prize at the Berlin International Film Festival that year.
The story is about two feminist groups who speak to the public about their issues via pirate radio. The groups, entitled ‘Radio Ragazza’ and ‘Phoenix Radio’, are lead by a white lesbian and black woman respectively. A political activist, Adelaide Norris, mysteriously dies after being arrested upon arrival into New York, an event which causes outrage in the local community. The film follows the story of the Women’s Army and its efforts in fighting against the The System. It even features a young Kathryn Bigelow as a newspaper intern who gets fired.
The film crosses into a number of genres and can be described as a ‘documentary-style feminist science fiction’ work. This melange of genres alone makes the film compulsory watching, as there’s very little like this out there in present-day cinema-even in the indie mode. It’s a film for New York lovers too, offering an alternative but no less accurate depiction (or documenting) of a side to 80s NYC that is completely avoided in our modern-day myth-making of the city.
Barbara Hammer was born in Hollywood herself and is a visual artist who works chiefly in film. Having made over eighty works in her forty year career and having been honoured and recognized through many awards, her analysis of this seminal work is not to be missed. She says “In 1983 when I saw Lizzie Borden’s Born In Flames, I was seeing a revolutionary movie with mostly female characters living in a self-constructed world surrounded by a hostile environment … There are some incredible scenes like a group of women on bicycles coming to the rescue of another; wheat pasting propaganda sheets throughout the streets of lower Manhattan; putting a condom on a penis.”
A film that explores race, class, sexuality and sexual politics through the perception and language of a prolific and pioneering artist — this is a real treat.
At the event, Barbara will also be reading from and signing her first book on queer cinema, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life. For more information please visit www.ifccenter.com.