Nitrate Kisses

PFFB classics, US 1992, 67 min., 16mm, engl. OV

By: Barbara Hammer (1939-2019)

With: Sally Binford, Frances Lorraine, Jack Waters, Peter Cramer, J.C. Barrone, Saylena Barrone, Alistair Fate, Julie Tolentino

In March 2019, Barbara Hammer, the experimental film director and pioneer of lesbian cinema, died. We pay tribute to her life and work with a screening of her classic “Nitrate Kisses”. In it, Hammer combines material from the presumably first gay film in American cinema history, “Lot in Sodom” from 1933, with the intimate stories of four lesbian women of different generations, in which the story of oppression and protest, hiding and coming out in the 20th century is inscribed. Film history and private life, society and body, politics and sexuality are woven together by Hammer into a film collage that is as intellectual as it is touching, which is shown here from a vintage 16mm film copy.

Supporting film: Vever (For Barbara)

US 2018, 12 min., engl. OV
(NX D F)

By: Deborah Stratman

A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Each woman extends her gaze like an offered hand to a subject she is outside of. “Vever (for Barbara)” grew out of the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections on failure, encounter, and initiation in 1950s Haiti. A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.