Our trip to the movies continues with this remarkable document of queer moviegoers in the early ‘80s.

Barbara Hammer’s Audience follows the trailblazing lesbian experimental filmmaker as she tours her work around the world. A snapshot of queer movie-lovers openly celebrating, and sometimes challenging, their representation on-screen, Hammer’s film stands out as both a remarkable historical document and a joyous self-portrait of a community that’s been under-served by the silver screen.

Audience begins in San Francisco, where Hammer’s films are being presented at The Roxie — a historic single-screen cinema in the Mission District currently campaigning to buy their building — during Gay Pride Week. As people queue outside, Hammer takes her camera to them, asking them what they expect to see in her work. The responses she gathers are varied: some women want to be turned on, others want to see positive representations of themselves, and one attendee, a clinician, expresses a hope that more people see Hammer’s film to better understand the lives and sexual practices of lesbian communities across the United States.

“I wanted everyone to speak for herself. I wanted to show the diversity in a women’s audience, the sophistication, the thoughtfulness, the fun-loving spirit, the flirtations, the detailed, the subtle. I wanted my audience to make their own film. In a time of national borders and increasing geographic chauvinism, I found images of women transcending boundaries and cultures and at the same time acting as spokespeople for cultural difference.” BARBARA HAMMER

The rest of Audience charts Hammer’s travels to London, Toronto, and Montreal, where her films are presented in more intimate settings. Here, her behind-the-scenes look at the discussions and small after-parties following each screening reveal how much Hammer was invested in parsing out questions of representation with audiences worldwide. Years later, she remarked that it was the “multiplicity” on-screen that most resonated with her, and how the film showed that the different communities she documented were “all so complex” rather than a “unified, solidified body.”

Barbara Hammer was born in Los Angeles, CA, in 1939. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and an MFA in English Literature, Hammer decided to study film at San Francisco State University. Her encounter with Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon proved revelatory and convinced her to make experimental films from that point onward. Throughout the ‘70s, Hammer directed 29 films, including several landmark lesbian films like Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976). As her career flourished, she became even more prolific and experimental. The close to 100 films she left behind represent a wide-range of social and political interests, as well as an unwavering commitment to aesthetic experimentation.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.