Barbara Hammer
7 p.m. Aug. 1
Kahn Jewish Community Center, West Bloomfield
www.jgnmi.org
Veteran lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer ("Nitrate Kisses") will speak about her documentary, "Lover Other: The Story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore," at 7 p.m. Aug. 1 at the Kahn Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield. The film, a tale of two French Jewish stepsisters living together as lovers, is a 55-minuate salute to 20th-century surrealist photographer, war resister and lesbian Claude Cahun.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian writes: "Barbara Hammer knows better than to try to look behind the mask to find the 'real' Cahun. As the academic among the polyphony of narrating voices in Hammer's documentary states, as if reading a cue card, 'Cahun's work suggests that identity can only be performed. It cannot be revealed.'
"So Hammer gives us a play of images and quotations (the script incorporates Cahun's writings, while actresses appear as the two women) that patch together Cahun's and Moore's lives during wartime on their adoptive isle of Jersey — focusing, in particular, on their acts of creative resistance to the occupying German forces that almost cost them their lives."
Not only is Hammer a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles with a bachelor's degree in psychology, Hammer is also armed with two Master's degrees from San Francisco State University, one in English literature and one in film.
Hammer is known for creating groundbreaking experimental films dealing with women's issues, including gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family. Hammer created some of the first lesbian-made films in history, including "Dyketactics" (1974) and "Women I Love" (1976).
