write an abstract proposing a paper

Barbara Hammer: Nitrate Kisses (1992) and "On the Politics of Abstraction"

1. Aesthetic choices, rhetorical effects: as we have seen so far, queer aesthetics is not about some unified approach to art but rather a matter of making assertions of self that often require overturning the usual mapping between narrative and aesthetic forms used to present images of "personhood." Queer aesthetics since the mid-19th century has had to do with “self-making,” as well as “social making.” In fact, experimental documentary work has taken on this kind of work explicitly. Challenging narrative conventions is equivalent, in Barbara Hammer's 1992 documentary essay Nitrate Kisses, to a politics of “self-naming” which Hammer writes about in her short essay about her approach, “The Politics of Abstraction.”

2. In this essay, Hammer acknowledges that a variety of theoretical paradigms have begun to be taught in relation to sexual politics. But in her work, she emphasizes a kind of abstraction that she feels is “realistic” (73). It’s through a realism that relies on overt, abstract uses of montage that Hammer feels she can create the kind of name for herself and and her lesbian community that is adequately rich.

3. This realism is not what we usually think of as realism, meaning representationally lifelike or accurate; rather, it's more a kind of historical and personal realism that insists on including first person perspective and a kind of essayistic result that requires the audience to think and feel what she is conveying. Central to her style of realism is an effect of "naming" rather than simply "re- presenting." She writes: “I have chosen images rather than words for the act of naming myself as an artist and as a lesbian because the level of meanings possible for images and image conjunctions seemed richer and held more ramifications. I have broken rules, studied the construction of norms, and questioned restraints since I was a little girl. It was not strange that I chose to prace in the longtime artistic traditioin of breaking or modifying the status quo in an attempt to advance the dialogue. Generally speaking, my films made in the seventies, Dyketactics, Multiple Orgasm, Double Strength, Women I love, and Superdyke, as well as others, were made with this intention that grew from an unconscious impulse to a conscious insistence on lesbian naming” (72).

4. This self-naming is a politics in and of itself; it works againt the tendency to be made historically invisible that lesbians have suffered, and it is a necessary part not only of reclaiming a history but of documenting (in fact, of creating, of making) a history that is adequate to one’s historical reality. Self-naming and documenting history are both political needs, and Hammer uses a specific style of montage to achieve them in cinematic terms.

5. Notably, while she herself appears in the film, as a reflected image of a woman holding a camera in a window relatively late in the film – and notice the multiple, complex “frames” implied in that image – and we also hear her voice early on in the film, but never “see her talking” in the conventional manner of the “talking head” presentation we are used to in typical documentary or interview films about history. For Hammer, perhaps, including her voice among other voices, and her own image on a building among other images of bodies and buildings is a form of self-naming that can only really be achieved through both the articulation of lesbian community and through the reclaiming of lesbian history.

6. What kinds of aesthetic choices does she make? What are we to make, particularly, of the contrast between the abstract shots of vibrantly passionate, sexual lesbian bodies and vacant, abandoned buildings?

a. Black and white still images and moving images; sometimes processed. Stark. b. Often this is roughly shot, and sometimes, it is home movies, or personal snapshots. c. Then again, mass-produced, iconic images of sexualized women: both Dietrich and

Garbo, icons for many in the lesbian community in part because of their numerous roles performed in men's clothing, show up in the film; or, pulp lesbian fiction book covers.

d. Oral interviews on soundtrack, recorded by Hammer. e. Realistic footage of lesbians (and sometimes, to a lesser degree, of gay men), speaking,

walking outside in public, being seen together in public; dancing; sometimes one person’s face is pixillated, presumably to protect her identity.

f. Abstract footage shot by Hammer, of abandoned buildings; g. And abstract, erotic footage of female bodies, often older, or later in the film, younger;

not centered on the face, and equally interested in various erogenous zones of the body.

h. In effect, the montage plays visibility against invisibility; presence against abandonment. i. The soundtrack is sometimes Hammer’s voice, sometimes the voice of her interview

subjects; but these voices are spliced together in sampled fragments which closely follow on one another, and they are not synchronized with the bodies on screen; they are all part of a flowing, historical continuum that is attentive to individuals but seems to be able to make room for many views;

j. The views expressed include ideas about work, social relations, physical pleasure. One woman says she was a very sexy child, interested in sexual play as a child. But we hear this as we are seeing older women having sex. The sense is that sexuality is human, present, but perhaps varying, from the time of childhood to the time of old age. This clear-eyed account counters that all-too-common trope which suggests homosexuality implies pedophilia.

k. sometimes we do get the sense that a particular image is that of a woman who has been speaking at times – but this is the effect of our own interpretive work, our own paying attention, our own discovery, over time, as we watch the film. I think that Jerre appears in the film, and we know Jerre’s name because her partner has introduced this name into the conversation; we have to do the work of recognition, it's not automatic, guaranteed by the medium or the narrative form - seeing and understanding who people are requires effort, participation, curiosity, good will, etc.

l. and there is music from earlier eras (I don’t think there is any contemporary music). This is Ma Rainey, a blues singer from the early 20th century who has also been a lesbian icon, for example, singing the “Prove it On Me Blues.” Or, there is Strauss’ “the Red Knight,” Der Rosencavalier, an opera that features cross-dressing and gender masquerade and which, as it happens, has been historically popular among some queer audiences. This varied soundtrack is important; the soundtrack careens from a range of American musics, to European musics, and back again; but too, so does the history of same-sex desire that Hammer is telling span from American queer communities, including interracial couples, to European histories of lesbian histories and lesbian disappearances, both during the Holocaust, and after. The flow of music parallels the flow of history.

m. Similarly, languages we see and hear are also imporant: English, German, French. Sound and image here are “polyphonic.” The overall montage of music and image tends to emphasize a stream, a flow, but a historical flow, yet one that has to be recovered and that, again, requires our effort to make sense of;

n. And this sense of flow is also achieved in the montage of images, where it seems to emphasize visibility and invisibility, presence, or abandonment; pleasure and affirmation, or disappearance. The key opposition that is operative in Nitrate Kisses’ visual “record” is that between living, breathing, dancing, desiring bodies, and abandoned, almost haunted-appearing buildings. Living history, recovered, recorded, and projected in this film, counterpoints images of histories lost, abandoned - like past queer histories lost to policies enforcing silence and exclusion, and like future queer histories, in Hammer's view, if they are not recorded and shared as they are lived and become historical.

o. So we do get to know people like Jerre, one of the women interviewed, to some degree as individuals; but more broadly, we get to know them as players in a vast historical stream that Hammer is bringing to light, and which Hammer's film suggests proceeds against two risks: becoming forgotten, in the past, or becoming unrealized in the future.

p. There is the theme of the invisibility of lesbians and lesbian history, signified by abandoned buildings as a history full of holes; this is a history of disappearances, and of death, ultimately: this history is dominant history; And, on the other hand, there are the living bodies, living voices, which flow through this history, and define it, giving it shape, sense, sex, and a present tense. These sounds and images indicate embodied, often struggling, living persons in a flowing, vital stream of life.

q. So this is audiovisual montage as a “politics of abstraction”: abstracted from fragmented pieces often alternating between vital desires for self-knowledge and self-sharing, and emptiness or dereliction; but for the audience, a flowing, living process which we must interpret, recognizing images in which desire is found to animate knowledge, or puzzling

over images suggesting processes of decay, in order to discover and to understand the goals and the challenges of self-naming and "making history."

r. In this process, any one fragment risks disappearance, abandonment, all over again; but by joining fragments together, and asking us to spend time gazing on "fragments" of buildings, in effect, to re-inhabit them with our desire and curiosity to know, Hammer creates not only sensual visual metaphors of dominant history as abandonment or death, but more importantly, in this process of "abstraction," as these sensuous visual metaphors provide the pleasure of seeking, they become re-associated with, and function as a kind of invitation to, a process in which the desire to know and the act of self-naming work in a kind of mutual process of revelation. The film works by prompting this kind of combinatory viewing and re-associating of distinct elements: images plus sound and music; image plus voice; etc. There is never a reduction of "desire" or "naming" either to only sound or to only image, and vice-versa. Life is a process of engaged, sensuous, piecing together of pieces, carried out at the risk of abandonment and with the goal of community formation and political and social transformation. Political struggle must be inscribed even as it is lived, but creating archives, recovering memories, is also political struggle in its own right.

s. As we learn in the film, “Nothing that has happened in history ever has to be considered lost.” If you're working with abstraction, missing or incomplete pieces are part of the way you work; you count on and need the audience to actively help you fill in those pieces, as well; history might work the same way;

t. Overall, lesbian history is regained as it is identified in relation to other histories: gay history, black history (as heard in the blues used on the soundtrack, for instance).

u. Notice the difference in the temporal vector, compared with Eisenstein. Eisenstein used montage to suggest a future identity of masses, eroticized in their new, revolutionary relationships with one another; Hammer uses montage to present an inquiry into erotic history, labor history, and intellectual history, all of which can be recovered by the present.

v. “Language organizes sexuality.” This comment suggests a similar understanding of the history of sexuality to that of Foucault, for whom "discourse" (including language but not limited to it) organizes sexuality as a power relation. In any case, if so, re-assembling sound and image to form a different, historical, audiovisual "language" of desire and memory might challenge that organization. [New media note: Christine Tamblyn is cited in credits.]

7. Example: Discovery and Disappearance: feminist and queer theories of history. Eve Sedgwick observes in Epistemology of the Closet that feminist inquiry and antihomophobic inquiry are not the same thing. Here’s an example of how Hammer differentiates them.

a. Kaleidoscopic, panning, spiraling: buildings and women. And, images of female icons. Vo: figure out the historical coding. What do these images actually mean to audiences?

b. images of female carresses; intercut with footage of abandoned buildings. c. Women’s bodies, again, sensuously: we move on to a comment about lesbians being

excluded from The Life and Times of Rosie The Riverter (1980, Connie Field), a documentary:

i. Jerre Kalbas, Lathe Operator: “I mean, Rosie the Riveter thing I gave an interview for that. They didn’t take me because they were taking women who had husbands or sons if you notice the movie; they weren’t going to take someone who was single and a lesbian; but they had my whole story down there. You know how I had to fight the men, and fought the union, to be able to get the other women to get their amount of money that they were supposed to get. Because they tried to hold me back. Oh yes, I fought like crazy. And then, that was the first time. And sat and did nothing for months until they would hear my story.”

d. Other woman (I think this is Sandy Kern): I used to go to “Holland,” I used to go to “Smalls.” (These were bars.) Cut to women dancing; then again, cut to women carressing. A miniature of lesbian life, from socializing to sexuality.

e. Ma Rainey blues on soundtrack: “Sho got to prove it on me.” f. AIDS, losses; abandoned buildings. Jerre standing outside what looks like an activist

center in NYC. It was her who took a young friend to his first opera; she educated him, helped to bring him up, just as the women educated each other about sex; his loss from AIDS then is a great historical loss in an extremely personal sense, another terrible challenge to self definition through mutality, cooperation, and autonomy.

g. Christopher Street: memories of raids: lesbians couple up and dance with gay men in cases of raids.

h. Ma Rainey: “I don’t like no men; It’s true I wear collars, and a tie” … “you sho got to prove it on me.”

i. Raids at a bar on Barrows Street. Jerre: in her fifties, protecting the young boys in drag, going with them to the police station.

j. Hammer: writing biographies from the points of view of social change agents, then you get a view of the out groups. “Like anything, it’s a tool in a political context.” Now, we have cut to women making love.

k. Authorial honesty (note that this is a very newly reconfigured kind of honesty; one that does very little with the highly "coded" explorations of sexuality by figures like Wilde, Sergei Eisenstein, or Gertrude Stein, etc.); and the contradiction of inscribing sexual subjects into history, and into film history. You need to try to leave the subject her own space, but on the other hand, her body is a kind of canvas on which various groups inscribe their issues.

l. How does Hammer use this canvas?