"Nitrate Kisses"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                              October 9, 1993

    Barbara Hammer has been around, making films, for twenty-five
years or more.  This is may be her first feature film, but it's
her fiftieth film!   Every time I've seen a Barbara Hammer film I
have been surprised.  The earliest films of hers I saw (although
I gather they're not the earliest in her ouevre) are short,
lyrical, exuberant and very explicit films of lesbian sexuality
such as "Dyketactics."

   Because the lesbian theme films were not getting the kind of
recognition that a filmmaker needs in order to continue to work,
Hammer moved away from explicitly lesbian subjects in her films
for a period and started making what she calls perceptual films,
avant garde, personal expressions of themes connected with life
and death, including one composed almost entirely of moving x-ray
images and another called "Vital Signs" that begins and ends with
the filmmaker herself in a macabre dance of death with a
skeleton.  These films earned her recognition and awards and are
in the collections of major muserums.  She finally did
even land a college teaching job (after 20 years of beingrejected
because she was a "radical lesbian feminist) and now she
teaches filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute.

   Having seen Barbara Hammer films from both of her earlier
periods I was intensely curious about how she was going to go
from this quite wonderful but demanding (for the audience) kind
of art film to a feature-length work accessible enough for film
festivals and theatrical release.  Last night I saw "Nitrate
Kisses" and Barbara Hammer had another surprise in store for me.
Once again, without leaving behind the spirit or techniques of
her two previous periods of work, Barbara Hammer has changed
direction by bringing elements of documentary filmmaking into her
work--interviews with key people (sometimes only on the
soundtrack), archival stills, clips from films of the 1930s,
written text and more.  The result is one of the most stunning,
rich, and philosophically grounded explorations of lesbian and
gay history that has ever been made.  It still makes demands on
the audience (as all good feminist filmmaking does) asking us to
participate in the uncovering of the history of the repression of
lesbian and gay sexuality in films and in our culture in the
years between the 1930s and the 1960s--never just filling us up
with predigested "information" but encouraging us to draw the
connections between the images, the words, the emotions on screen
and in ourselves as we watch.

   Not only is this a film about uncovering the history that has
been silenced, it is a film about discovering the processes by
which that repression was accomplished.  When we see things in
"Nitrate Kisses" that we've never seen on the screen before (e.g.
lesbians in their seventies or lesbians with pierced bodies
wearing leather and chains making tender love) it hits home how
limited the representations of lesbian sexuality on film are.  In
another section of the film a black man and a white man make love
while the text of the Hayes Office Code that codified what was
allowed in Hollywood films between 1934 and 1964 scrolls on the
screen.  Two of the things it forbade were "perversion" and
"miscegenation." But we in the audience are put in a diffcult
position at this point at least the first time we see the film:
do we watch the lovemaking or do we read the text (thereby
performing a little act of self-censorship)?

   Some of the most astonishing footage in the film are outtakes
from the pre-Hayes Code "Lot in Sodom," (1933) a clearly
homoerotic theatrical film that Hammer found in the archives of
the Eastman House in Rochester.  These old nitrate prints contain
what Hammer believes to be the first homosexual kisses ever put
on film--and explain her title.

    Another section of the film consists of striking visual
images Hammer shot in Germany.  On the sound track we are invited
to explore further the ways lesbian history is lost as we hear
straight concentration camp survivors giving homophobic accounts
that seemingly distort the lives of lesbians in the camps; at the
same time the lesbians who survived the camps came back to a
homophobic post-war era that demanded silence as the price of
survival.

   There is so much more in this truly marvelous, beautiful,
moving, disturbing, and inspiring work of art, funded, in part,
by the NEA!  It's the work of a mature and enormously talented
filmmaker who is at that point in her development that she should
just be turned loose with her ideas and her camera and her
optical printer and enough money to do what she wants.  Who knows
what riches she would contribute to the world as she continues to
create her own brand of lesbian feminist film.  Does the
MacArthur Foundation take nominations for their genius awards?
If so, Barbara Hammer is my nomination.

   Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the
author.