‘Barbara Forever’ Won’t Let You Forget

After listening to a critique of the Miss America pageant on a public radio station, Barbara Hammer declared herself a feminist. Then she left her husband. Then she became a lesbian. This was the early 1970s, and it wasn’t long before someone gifted baby gay Hammer a Super-8 and she commenced pointing it—lovingly, relentlessly—at every human crease and crevice in her life. Around this time, Hammer started writing down her name and address and placing them in balloons for others to find. “Otherwise I’d be lost in the world,” she said of the practice in an “exit interview,” given just before she died in 2019. Brydie O’Connor’s Barbara Forever is one of these balloons; a documentary worthy of its iconic subject, that captures and arranges fragments of Barbara for us to turn over in our hands. It’s a devoted, sincere ode to the avant-garde artist, who, as she put it, made movies out of sex and life. More than 80 of them, to be a little more precise, over the course of half a century. Hammer filmed herself and her personal relationships obsessively, creating the vast archive that serves as the basis of Barbara Forever. At the beginning of the film, there’s a series of images of Hammer pointing a camera into a passing window, or the rearview mirror of a car or motorcycle, her left eye squinting, her right looking into a viewfinder. We often see Barbara holding and speaking directly to the camera in the documentary, creating the uncanny sense that she made it herself, from beyond the grave. Though Hammer narrates the entire documentary, the narrative is pieced together from various sources. Babara’s voice will sound effortful and aged at one moment, then youthful and mischievous in the next. O’Connor also replicates her subject’s love of a match-cut, folding together images from throughout Hammer’s career. The result is not the chronology of a life, but the story of a filmmaker—starting when Barbara first picked up a camera, and ending with who she became to others. It’s a story of self-creation and self-plunder, of Barbara inventing herself and using her life as the raw material of her artistry.

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