By Michael Wallin
 
This essay originally appeared in Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid, eds., Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 196-201. Republished with the permission of the Estate of Michael Wallin.
 
In 1971 I began graduate film school at San Francisco State University. My undergraduate major had been psychology, but at Yale and UC Berkeley I had been exposed to a huge range of experimental film, everything from Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie (the lyrical end) to Michael Snow and Paul Sharits (the structural end), with side trips to Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. The latter two, with their frank, intense, yet matter-of-fact portrayal of queer sexuality, were revelations. One didn’t hold back one’s feelings regarding this renegade art form, as was made abundantly clear at two Yale screenings I remember vividly. At one, a segment of the audience couldn’t tolerate the lack of sound in Brakhage’s work, and actually threw overripe tomatoes at the screen. At another, word that the Japanese avant-garde maker Takahiko limura would show his sexually explicit films spread so that an enormous mob appeared, and the crush of horny, agitated (male) students led to the New Haven police being called to prevent a riot.
But it was the work of Bruce Baillie that most moved me and initially influenced my films. When I learned that he would be teaching filmmaking at the Mendocino Art Center in the summer of 1968, I was thrilled. Along with a high school crush and budding painter, Alex, I spent that summer enthralled by Baillie, the man and his methods, and I was the class’s most passionate student. Baillie was filming Quick Billy, and I was proud to be asked to be camera for scenes in which he appeared. Alex was an early character in my own first films, my art fueled by erotic sublimation.
I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley in 1969 when, shortly after the Stonewall riots, I came out, along with thousands in the Bay Area. The closets suddenly seemed empty. When I arrived at San Francisco State, I had little on my mind except film and sex, and it seemed natural to bring the two together. My exposure to personal experimental film at Yale suggested the importance of individual expression on film in an honest and open fashion. One’s intimate life could be the subject of one’s art, and what is more intimate than sex?
Up to this time (to these eyes, in any case), there had been little on the screen of homoerotic interest. Two notable exceptions that I had seen while in high school were made nearly a quarter century earlier: Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) and Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950). I found both films profoundly erotic and disturbing, and both strongly influenced The Place Between Our Bodies, my 1975 thesis film. This became a marker of sorts, being described as the first gay (“queer” hadn’t emerged as the term of choice) film to portray explicit sex/lovemaking—Mark, my lover, and I were sensitively filmed by my straight friend, Lenny Levy—without being pornographic. The Place was not designed to be a solely voyeuristic experience, its purpose simply to titillate, to provide masturbatory fodder; the film had heart, soul, and wonder at its core. At its premiere screening at S.F. State in which grads presented their thesis films, it was met with shock, silence, and kudos. I was proud and terrified, and was congratulated on my courage. The film is raw and confessional and traverses my own sexual odyssey: desire, fantasy, cruising/anonymous sex, and falling in love.
I was proud of my sexuality and, being a rebel and a hippie, perfectly happy to flaunt it. From the time I came out until I met Mark in 1973, my sex life had mostly been a series of one-night stands, a period fueled by fantasy, desire, and a sort of benign sexual addiction. I had also fallen in love with Sam, who was in a relationship: we met secretly to see each other and kiss passionately, but the lure of the unattainable was powerful. All of these erotic phenomena became the subject matter of The Place Between Our Bodies. The initial scenes, shot wandering the streets, suggest a furtive, charged, yet slightly desperate search for an erotic connection. We see many guys in their late teens or early twenties lounging around suggestively or going about their lives, the camera catching faces and gestures. These men, unaware of being filmed, have a physical and emotional distance, suggesting my own struggle with making a real connection and the primacy of fantasy and projection in the sexual hunt. A quick 8mm shot of Alex finds its way into the film; Sam plays himself in an Anger-like fantasy sequence; Mark becomes the focus in the final third, embodying the romantic/erotic ideal, a being in whom I could invest all of my love and sexual energy. The scenes of lovemaking seem almost too leisurely, as the film luxuriates in the tenderness and intensity of the sex act.
These were heady and exciting times for queers of all persuasions. For those making films, the period provided ready-made subject matter: ourselves and the new movement of “gay liberation.” Another student at SF State was Barbara Hammer, who was just starting to produce lesbian-themed films. We became the “odd couple” of queer film, although she soon far outpaced me in terms of output. I was the Bruce Baillie, she the Stan Brakhage of this niche of experimental film. Her early Dyketactics (1974), Women I Love (1976), and Multiple Orgasm (1977) were groundbreaking statements. They not only portrayed women loving women, but women as sensual and sexual beings, a notion that was still a rarity on-screen. Though less plentiful than their male counterparts, other lesbian filmmakers were making explicit work, such as Constance Beeson, with her lyrical, bucolic film Holding (1971).
Interestingly, aside from supporting one another’s work, there was not a lot of cross-pollination between the worlds of experimental gay male and lesbian film. I respected and encouraged Barbara, and she me, but we didn’t become involved in any creative collaboration. The cross-pollination that did occur happened socially: we were part of a network of queer, straight (sexually, that is), and questioning (today’s term) experimental artists and hippies, bound less by sexual orientation than our taste in drugs and music. We celebrated our countercultural roots at parties, screenings, bars, and clubs. This was the period of women’s liberation as well, and lesbians were at the vanguard (many young women were “choosing” to become lesbians!). Women in general didn’t want to have a lot to do with men, gay or not. So it wasn’t a cohesive scene; rather, the movements developed in parallel. There was the notion that men couldn’t begin to understand female sexuality, and vice versa.
San Francisco State was hardly a hotbed of queer activity; however, Barbara and I were seen as rebels and innovators, stirring up the shit in an otherwise precious atmosphere. The French cineastes, signs versus symbols: semiotics was the film theory du jour. I, being more of an auteurist, found myself on the outs. Semiotics seemed too cerebral, too intellectually pristine. The auteur stance was about the artist, and how his or her stylistic “stamp” marked each film. This made sense to me, a nascent film artist trying to stake out territory in a crowded field. My films would reflect me: the queer me, the sexual me, the tender me, the tortured (!) me, the ecstatic me. Barbara held a similar perspective. But putting female and male genitalia into the pot (never in the same pot) got us into a lot of trouble. The proposal for The Place Between Our Bodies did not allude to the X-rated sex, hence the stunned silence that greeted its premiere. You couldn’t intellectualize this stuff; it hit you in your heart (and loins).
Several important Bay Area queer filmmakers were working in the early 1970s. Curt McDowell was at the San Francisco Art Institute across town. Curt, who died tragically of AIDS in 1987, was one of a kind. His films combined vaudeville, hard-core sex, and personal revelation. Confessions (1971) was a coming-out letter to his parents and the world, a detailing of his sexual escapades. Ronnie (1972) was a crude (but loving) exposé of a male hustler, ending (appropriately) with a hand job. Nudes (A Sketchbook) (1975) was a pansexual series of self-contained vignettes portraying the (mostly sexual) quirks of his friends, both male and female. Curt might have been the first truly “queer” experimental filmmaker; he certainly would have embraced the term.
Curt was unique in this respect: resisting categorization as gay or bi, he was perhaps the first of this generation of filmmakers who celebrated sex itself, without taking a stand or proselytizing. For Curt, sex was another element of being completely alive. In ways he was a sexual “naif,” eavesdropping on the many ways both men and women could sensually and sexually use their bodies and enjoy themselves. A preeminent voyeur, his last important work, Loads (1980), unabashedly explored a fetish of his own, which in another era would have been “rough trade.” The film chronicles encounters (though Curt is a minor character, being behind the camera) with (mostly) hairy, muscled, tattooed, and, importantly, straight men, each episode ending in the act that lends the film its title. In an era of gay liberation, this could be construed as internalized homophobia and self-hatred, but Curt stood outside politics.
There were, as well, representatives of the earlier generation of experimental filmmakers whose work embodied a queer sensibility. Primary in the Bay Area was James Broughton, whose playful, life-affirming, androgynous films took a sexual turn in the seventies, undoubtedly due to gay liberation. Broughton was a teacher of mine at SF State and an important influence, more on my life than on my films. I took his class Visionary Film (which he also taught at the Art Institute). I found his own films a bit silly and precious, but his taste was impeccable; the course was a sort of encyclopedic history of experimental cinema, featuring many seminal works I had not seen. The most potent for me was Christopher Maclaine’s The End (1953). The film (while having little to do with sexuality per se) dealt with the ways human beings make connections and yet how intensely alone each of us really is.
Broughton was all about connection: a sensualist who brought his notions of physicality and the polymorphously perverse into his classroom, behavior that today would result in being fired and ostracized. Broughton had his hands all over his students (or at least those, such as this writer, he found attractive and sensed wouldn’t reject his overtures), but never inappropriately. He was simply happy being in physical contact with other men. He represented something missing from the rest of the scene at SF State, a lightness and frivolity that was a refreshing break from semiotics.
San Francisco State and the San Francisco Art Institute were a study in contrasts, the former rule-bound and academic, and the latter lawless, with an anything-goes attitude. Broughton became lovers with a student at the Art Institute, Joel Singer, another situation that today wouldn’t be tolerated. They collaborated on films such as Song of the Godbody (1977), which featured extreme close-ups of Broughton’s nude body; Hermes Bird (1979), perhaps the ultimate ode to the phallus, Joel’s that is; and Devotions (1983), portraits of male couples. For James, Joel was a paragon of masculine beauty and a muse for his later work. Joel was more a minimalist/structuralist in his work and brought cinematic discipline to their collaborations. In films such as The Gardener of Eden (1981), filmed in Sri Lanka and celebrating the lushness of the tropical landscape (and the beauty of its young men), Joel’s controlled camera and editing worked beautifully with Broughton’s rich sensuousness. The film is lushly green, reflecting the tropics; out of the trees and foliage comes a succession beautiful, dark, somewhat androgynous young men. They throb almost psychedelically and seem to invite us into their innocent, primal world where pleasures of the flesh can be indulged without guilt or shame.
George Kuchar, who had been working in the Bronx, moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and also taught at the Art Institute. With his unique artistic sensibility, George was another one of a kind, a sort of child-man. Sometimes I questioned whether this was an act, a crafted persona, but George was George and never less than genuine. Influence and collaboration were important factors in the nascent queer film scene. George and Curt McDowell became lovers for a time. George had always been more circumspect in his portrayal of sex, but with Curt produced what came to be another milestone, Thundercrack (1975). The film was an outrageous two-hour feature that combined the camp parody of Kuchar with the sexually explicit gay/straight/bi couplings of McDowell, starring the inimitable Marion Eaton (and her versatile cucumber). I remember early screenings of Thundercrack (at the Roxie Cinema and Canyon Cinematheque) as wild, untamed explosions of hilarity and outrageous carrying on, where all of us hippie, queer artists came together to celebrate our audacious “fuck you” attitude toward the uptight “straights” (as in conventional). No one cared about sexual orientation, so long as you flaunted it. These screenings were like parties: there was no separation between the filmmakers, cast, and audience. The artists simply gave voice to the Zeitgeist; we were in this together. As the couplings on-screen became steamier, the audience became more raucous, shouting at the screen, egging the characters on, as if watching some live improvisational happening.
Like most vibrant fringe artistic scenes, queer experimental cinema became more mainstream, if not exactly co-opted (since queer sex could never be shown at the neighborhood multiplex, much less on PBS). This happened with the advent of the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, which made its first humble appearance in 1977, screening Super 8 films in a small auditorium to a select few. The slightly larger 1978 version was the first of many festival screenings for The Place Between Our Bodies. Yet these events were still underground affairs; the press was minimal, and you learned about the screenings through the gay papers (B.A.R., The Sentinel), flyers on telephone poles in the Castro and South of Market, and by word of mouth. My recollections of these and other early gay screenings are vague (keeping in mind the maxim “If you remember those days vividly you probably weren’t there”!). However, I was pleased that my film had been chosen for this seminal event: I felt vindicated in my new identity as “gay filmmaker.” As well, an entire artistic movement and powerful sexual minority had finally been given legitimacy and a voice.
Yet, in a few years, the Lesbian & Gay Film Festival evolved, with a different audience and purpose in mind. Even if the agenda was not precisely political, the goal was to broaden exposure to the general public of gay and lesbian film, that public being, of course, other gay men and lesbians. These were people for whom sexual orientation was a central part of their identity, but in a different way than for the disenfranchised queers flocking to Thundercrack. The Stonewall rebellion was almost a decade old, and the boys in their teens and men in their twenties who came out then were settling happily into their gay identity, wearing it like a badge. These were mostly mainstream, “straight” gay men who spent their time at bars in the Castro dancing to disco and then meeting at the South of Market bathhouses. Somehow, we offbeat gay boys disdained this scene, preferring to congregate at the Stud (the original on Folsom Street), or at the crazy diner Hamburger Mary’s, which had an amazing collection of flea-market kitsch hanging from the ceiling and walls.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The San Francisco alternative gay scene was already flourishing in the early seventies. It gathered steam and gained notoriety with the appearance of the in-your-face bearded drag troupe the Cockettes; the playful, anti-religious collection of (again bearded) nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence; and finally, the outrageous films of John Waters, starring the one-of-a-kind creature Divine. I vividly remember being at the Stud and going home with a beautiful long-haired blond named David. Waking up at his place, we walked into the kitchen and there was his roommate, Divine (sans big hair).
Ironically, it was shortly after The Place that I completely departed from sex or queer identity as subject matter. Somehow, for me, the energy had dissipated and become darker. Perhaps this was reflected by the shift in the drug scene, from marijuana and psychedelics to cocaine, speed, and heroin. I finally returned to exploring queer identity in my work with the film Decodings (1988) over a decade later. This was a backward look, through the lens of found footage—documentaries, newsreels, instructional films—at growing up male and gay in the 1950s and sixties. The film reflected the alienation from one’s sexuality given the sociocultural repression of the period. This hauntingly paralleled the renewed repression of the 1980s, in which sex almost retreated into the closet with the AIDS epidemic. Decodings portrays desperate attempts to make physical and emotional connections with other males (if only through the discipline of the military or contact sports) to loosen the suffocating self-constraint of rigid social controls. The narration is dark and ironic: our un-hero only gets relief by driving into the eye of a massive storm. But poignancy triumphs: “A heart is laid bare.”
In 1995 my preoccupations came full circle with Black Sheep Boy, perhaps a more mature, restrained version of The Place that addressed many of the same issues. Here I was, twenty years older, again pondering the timeless questions of longing, desire, and human connection. The film seems less celebratory than nostalgic and sad, yet no less obsessed with its subject. Again I examine that double-edged sword, the allure of youth. Yet here I am more the detached observer than the involved participant. The camera more carefully explores its subject: a series of young men, this time aware of being filmed, not quite acting but appropriately (by degrees) awkward and self-conscious. They are both themselves and a composite projection of what I want them to be, shaped by the caress of the camera. The narration of tales and allegories, some fantastic, some gritty, are united by their sexual charge and (again) desperate need to connect, perhaps with my younger self. It is bracketed by the story of a twelve-year-old waif wandering bleak underground tunnels clutching dying flowers. Black Sheep Boy is not about being queer, but neither, really, was The Place about being gay. They are both personal testaments that deal with sexuality, one from the vantage of a twenty-five-year-old, the other from that of a forty-five-year-old. One could say that Black Sheep Boy represents the more measured, internalized self I seem to have become. Still, the more things change . . .
As a filmmaker and artist, I came of age with the movement. In retrospect, my coming out in 1969 seemed representative of a certain generation of gay men. We were too young to have inhabited the closets for long, yet enjoyed twelve liberating, mostly joyous years before AIDS made its tragic appearance. The newer generation of gay men would never be able to separate sex and death. As someone who has experienced both sides of this sexual trajectory (the early open brashness followed suddenly by the scary consequences of that hedonism), I’ve grown older with the movement as well. It’s been an exhilarating and sometimes horrifying ride, and has certainly provided a complex perspective to the role sex plays in my life and my relationships.
This sobering thought brings me, circuitously, to my final point: Are we experimental filmmakers who sometimes make queer films? Or are we queer filmmakers who make queer films, whatever the subject? Or is this one of those academic conundrums it is futile to attempt to resolve? In Amsterdam, that queerest of cities, there is no Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Perhaps that’s as good an answer as we’ll get.
 
              
            

              

                                
 
This invitation was shared with Canyon Cinema by Barabara Hammer in February 2016 as part of a tribute to Michael Wallin, who died in December 2015. Michael Wallin is a key figure in Canyon Cinema’s history having served as manager and then as a board member during 1970s through 1990s.
              
            

              

                                
By Susannah Magers
As is all too typical for female artists, Barbara Hammer is enjoying a major, extended moment of recognition later in her career, with a comprehensive exhibition, Evidentiary Bodies, realized at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in 2017. Her 1976 16mm film, Multiple Orgasm, graced the cover of the April 2018 issue of Artforum, an electrifying moment given the magazine’s history of snubbing women artists (according to artist Micol Hebron, as of 2015 the work of women artists has appeared on only 18% of Artforum’s hallowed covers). In this issue, critic Rachel Churner assesses Hammer’s overlooked contribution to feminist art and queer filmmaking and notes “the political urgency of representation” that Hammer’s work and ethos implores.
In 2011, writer and film scholar Greg Youmans and I discovered we shared a desire for and love of lesbian and queer cinema, with specific intersections around the work of Barbara Hammer. I had recently finished a graduate thesis—excerpted below—centering on feminist and queer agency through experimental filmmaking in the 1970s. I specifically compared the work of Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann in the context of a curated film program by the late Freude Bartlett presented in the May/June 1974 issue of Canyon Cinemanews.
Corresponding with Hammer, Greg and I tried to generate momentum for a retrospective. Barbara was all for it, but funding and securing a venue—just a few of the precarities of an independent curator’s life—proved challenging. Greg and I were both juggling jobs and impending moves, and we ended up needing to shelve the idea.
Fast-forward to 2017, and curators Staci Bu Shea and Carmel Curtis are tapped by Hammer to take up the charge to mount a long-overdue reckoning with her work at Leslie-Lohman. In an August 2017 interview with Hammer, curator Jamillah James describes how she needed to take electives as a film student in the 1990s to see films by women, people of color, and queer folks, as they simply weren’t included in the curriculum. This mirrors my own experience as a graduate student in San Francisco. Aside from an undergraduate course on queer history for which I offered to be a teaching assistant (without compensation, just to take the class), there was only one such class, two hours or so as part of a core class on feminist and queer artists and their contribution to the art world. It felt, and indeed was, woefully inadequate.It remains urgent for us to advocate for recognition and support—critically, financially, curatorially, and myriad other forms—for women’s creative labor and contributions. Though it is now fashionable to espouse diversity, and despite the fact that women comprise nearly three quarters of art school students, one still sees serious opportunity gaps in museum leadership, boards of directors, and collection acquisitions and exhibition. Hammer has described how her work—and in particular, Dyketactics (1974)—was created to fill a void, a stand-in for the absence of references and touchstones, the possibility of seeing others like herself on screen. My thesis and my curatorial emphasis emerged from a similar place, to address and make a place for those whose lives and experiences intersect with and reflect mine.
The occasion of Canyon Cinema’s 50th anniversary provides an excellent opportunity to renew these conversations around representation and access. Touring programs like Associations, which in addition to Hammer include the work of Abigail Child, Stephanie Barber, and Sara Kathryn Arledge, endeavor to expand on Canyon’s legacy through intergenerational juxtapositions. Decodings, featuring films by Cauleen Smith, Mariah Garnett, JoAnn Elam, Jodie Mack, and Naomi Uman, actively engages with ideas concerning female and marginalized representation in filmmaking. Like Freude Bartlett’s Human Sexuality: Films By Women program, they exist as points in a vast, evolving, and intersectional filmmaking genealogy that we can continue to cultivate, lift up, and, perhaps most importantly, intentionally shape.
—Susannah Magers, 2018
 

 
Early issues of the Canyon Cinemanews possess an unconventional, even chaotic visual aesthetic anticipating contemporary zines. As Canyon founder Bruce Baillie stated, “The devotees have a policy of non-policy.”1 Beginning in the early 1970s, however, the newsletter began to adapt a more standardized format. Issues are smaller and less chaotic, though still lacking a table of contents. While the stream-of-consciousness style certainly lent the early issues a quirky charisma, the later issues are easier to read. Content is delineated so that the reader doesn’t need to jump between festival listings, editorializing, letters from readers, and new additions to Canyon’s film library. The May/June 1974 issue is one of the first to adopt this more traditional layout—and the first to surfaces a clear stance on and commitment to the coverage and distribution of women’s writing, ideas, and films.
The first page reads:
The single most important social change of the last decade has been the growth of the woman’s movement. Film, as a means of communication, is an important tool in organizing, educating and “looking inside.” Limited by space and time, this issue is only a sampling of the women filmmakers whose work is available through Canyon Cinema.
 



 
This was written by Canyon filmmaker Freude, formerly Freude Bartlett. She chose to go by first name only when she separated from husband Scott Bartlett, a prolific filmmaker in his own right. Her declaration marks a shift in tone for Canyon Cinema, making the egalitarian administration and ethos of the organization more visible through the kind of content being offered.
A self-described feminist, Freude’s curatorial selection of women’s films under the title Human Sexuality: Films By Women is marked by an attention to feminist content. No doubt a polemical offering, it gracefully avoids guiding its audience through a narrow lens of sexuality. Rather, it’s a program of films by women exploring and commenting upon all kinds of sexuality and feminist experience. Freude creates an intellectually and socially gendered space where sexuality is fluid, discovered, and celebrated. By turns satirical, self-reflexive, and intensely moving, the films of Human Sexuality: Films By Women are all profound visual testimonies to what it was to be a feminist-identified woman making art in the 1970s. Further, film programs like this one served a double purpose: to convene and engage communities through their artistic and cultural production, and, certainly for Freude, to engage them in a form of consciousness-raising through the content of these film screenings.
An Analysis of Freude’s Human Sexuality: Film By Women
In her groundbreaking 1975 essay, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” film theorist Claire Johnston describes a collective production effort aimed at altering the ways in which women negotiate their presence in filmmaking.
The development of collective work is obviously a major step forward; as a means of acquiring and sharing skills it constitutes a formidable challenge to male privilege in the film industry as an expression of sisterhood, it suggests a viable alternative to the rigid hierarchical structures of male-dominated cinema and offers real opportunities for a dialogue about the nature of women’s cinema within it. At this point in time, a strategy should be developed which embraces both the notion of films as a political tool and film as entertainment.2
Along these same lines, it’s significant that Freude maintained a notable camaraderie and friendship with many of the filmmakers featured in her program. Often enough, they appeared in each other’s films. Up until the end of the 1970s, Freude was a distributor herself, forming her Serious Business Company in 1973: “I would take films because I loved them or I thought they were important, not necessarily because they were sellable.”3  She was directly involved in making sure these works were visible: “It’s a function of this business and my art to alter attitudes.”4
The Human Sexuality program grows out of this same generosity. To be sure, feminists at this time were extremely divided on sex: both in terms of its representation in media and what it meant for women. Freude wasn’t firmly in any camp, accepting films showing female nudity and only insisting upon female authorship.
The ten films in Freude’s Human Sexuality: Films By Women program signal an awareness of a new consciousness for the filmmakers and their audience, with each film addressing aspects of sexuality in these women’s lives—be it repression, objectification, or, in most cases, pleasure.
 

 
The first is Anne Severson’s (who now goes by Alice Anne Parker) I Change, I Am the Same (1969), a 30-second satirical commentary on the notion of gendered clothing. It features Severson’s then lover, Shelby Kennedy, and herself in various states of undress, in “each other’s” clothing. From the Canyon catalog description: “You in your clothes, me in my clothes, you in my clothes. Me in your underpants, you in nothing, you in my underwear…” Also included is Severson’s Riverbody (1970), a continuous dissolve montage of 87 male and female SFAI colleagues and students. When viewed in conjunction with I Change, I Am the Same, this film reads as a further meditation on what is left when we remove gendered and socially accepted norms from our visual vocabulary. It is also a collectively engaged production, with SFAI’s community brought together through a feminist-inspired desire to freely show the naked body, female and male.
The next two films have proved elusive, though Freude’s brief descriptions provide enough information to know that these films feature non-heterosexual explorations of sexuality. Penelope Spheeris’s I Don’t Know (1972) is described as a love story between a boy who wishes he were a girl and a girl who wishes she were a boy, while Virginia Giritlian’s Cumulus Nimbus (1973) is about a woman deciding whether to be intimate with another woman. Spheeris is an accomplished film and movie director whose work ranges from her 1980 documentary about the Los Angeles punk rock scene, The Decline of Western Civilization, to the cult classic Wayne’s World (1992). I Don’t Know seems to have been made while Spheeris was a film student at UCLA. The unfixed identity of the two characters presents what could be read as queer by contemporary standards, though it’s hard to speculate how this figuring of identity plays out between the characters, or how feminism informs this relationship, without any additional information on the film. Virginia Giritlian’s Cumulus Nimbus turned up little in research, but I did come across reviews of the film in the Canyon Cinemanews. One of these reviews, featured as part of a set done by San Francisco State University film students, states: “Most films only portray the surface value of speech and action. This film explored the thoughts and feelings of the people as a reality as valid as the activity of the people themselves.” Another review uses the definition of a cumulus nimbus cloud as a metaphor for the feelings of a character pondering her sexuality, a nimbus cloud being one that is about to bring rain. The complexity of this sexuality seems not to have been lost on these film students. In contrast, the review offered by the Independent Journal of San Rafael, reprinted in a 1975 issue of Canyon Cinemanews, reports on the Marin City College trustees’ viewing of Cumulus Nimbus [with Coni Beeson’s Holding (1971) and Barbara Linkevitch’s Silverpoint (1974), both featuring sexually explicit, lesbian content] and shows another cultural reaction indicative of the time period and feminism’s controversy:
The films were principal targets of attacks by several Marin clergyman at the trustees’ meeting. Trustee Robert Lee Grant emerged from the screening declaring that Holding is ‘pornographic – just like a couple of pornographic films I’ve seen in movie theaters. I don’t have a problem with the other two, except to ask why are they all about the same topic,” Grant added.
Grant’s reactions are telling about the social reception of these films and point to why Freude may have included her line about the films being “anti-pornographic” in her description. Grant is, unwittingly, illuminating feminism’s influence and impact on women’s filmmaking in the Bay Area.
Orange (1971), by Karen Johnson, is a close-up of the peeling and probing of an orange, “invoking orifice erotica,” in Freude’s words. One of the more humorous depictions of sexuality in the program, Johnson’s finger goes in and out of the orange to an upbeat soundtrack, her finger glistening with the juice of the orange. Many of the films of this 1970s filmmaking period invoke food as sexual metaphor or sexual surrogate, but Orange unfortunately doesn’t hold the self-reflexive poignancy of the rest of the films in this set.
Stand Up and Be Counted (1970), Freude’s own contribution, is a short series of long dissolves of nude couples set to the Rolling Stones’ “We Love You,” and is intended as a tribute to and wedding present for John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Like Severson’s Riverbody, this film features coupled, naked bodies to suggest a sexual freedom in representation. The women and men are smiling, kissing, talking, and generally happy. They hold a piece of paper between their bodies, the “screen” in which the next couple appears.
Crocus (1971) is a montage of scenes of the natural world, flowers, birds, and vegetables by Suzan Pitt Kraning. It is the one animated film in the program. It begins with a nude man “growing” from what is presumably a crocus bulb. Then, we see a woman (an animated Kraning) in a bedroom, touching herself, her breasts, moaning and sighing. A man (her husband) comes down the hallway, moving like Frankenstein. He enters the room, gets a massive erection, and starts laughing. She starts laughing too, he touches her face, and moaning sounds are heard again, softly, as they get into bed. A child’s call of “Mommy” is heard, breaking the scene. She gets up and goes to the child’s bedroom, where she comforts the child and puts him back to sleep. She goes back to the bedroom, turns on a radio, and music starts playing as the couple starts up again. The screen begins to spin. In a bizarre turn, a cucumber floats in through the bedroom door and leaves through the window. It is followed by a lit-up Christmas tree; a bird (swallow); roses, which circle the room before exiting through the window; then butterflies. A woman, of the same likeness as the one in the bed, suddenly appears in the mirror next to the bed, holding a film camera up to her eye, filming the lovemaking scene from inside the mirror. This addition, a deliberate assertion that Kraning herself has produced this picturing of her life and sexuality—as a mother, wife, and sexual being in her own right—marks its feminism.
Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1967) is the longest and best-known film in the program. I will discuss this work, which Freude describes as “a classic, artful, and arousing treatment of lovemaking,” in comparison with Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974) later in this essay.
Women (1974) is Coni Beeson’s satirical montage made for the National Sex Forum about stereotypes. Sex sounds open on the soundtrack, with a female voice declaring, “I am woman.” A list is read of the various names by which women are marked: “bitch, mother, chick, philly, foxy, sow, cow, hooker, piece of ass, slut, two bit whore, sissy lady, stepmother, tart sister, Ms., dyke, baby, belle, lesbian, sweetie, sexpot, floozy, siren, vamp vixen, cherry, chicken, witch, doll, honey pie, femme, girl, softy, sweet, adorable, beautiful, earth mother, black magic woman, tomboy, kept woman, maiden, aunt, dame, frump, waif, heiress…” The list stops and then continues at points throughout the film, emphasizing the many derogatory names for women. Various women are panned up and down by the camera in a manner reminiscent of Martha Rosler’s Vital Statistics of A Citizen Simply Obtained (1977). Meanwhile, a lively 1940s piano riff plays as women dance. The list of female labeling terms starts up again: “vessel, receptacle…” A mother and daughter are shown talking on a porch about “losing virginity.” The conversation is doubled; the words tumble out, and jumble together, almost incomprehensible to discern, hinting at the fraught tensions surrounding talking about female sexuality in the 1970s. We see women’s bodies again, babies nursing, milk dripping from breasts. “Marm, nanny, old lady, temptress, FEMINIST.” Ocean waves. A man pleasures a woman with his hand. A man and woman are seen having sex, her on top, while a woman’s voice can be heard reciting breathlessly, “warm…so many things.” A country song begins, “I want a man who feeds the baby, brings me coffee in the morning.” Then: “Never trust a woman.” We see a stripper on stage, with music playing, an idea elaborated in Gunvor Nelson’s Take Off (1972): “We don’t need a man around.” A woman lays in a meadow, with flowers all over her nude body, being touched tenderly by other women. These women then roll around in the sand at the beach, rolling on top of one another. Women ends with a clothed woman, wearing a large diamond ring, running her hand listlessly through daisies. She blows on dandelions, making wishes about her life and future, we assume. The film ends on what is an intentionally ironic, socially acceptable and decidedly “un-feminist” (in the context of women’s portrayal in the other films chosen by Freude) picture of a woman: fully clothed, betrothed, and placing her future in someone else’s hands.
Take Off is “a documentary of a stripper with a punch line ending” by Gunvor Nelson. Burlesque dancer Ellion Ness struts to a sultry jazz soundtrack by Pat Gleeson. Ness slowly takes off white gloves and twirls around a fur stole as she starts to undress. The camera draws close to her thrusting hips and bottom jiggling in a fringed undergarment. As she shakes and shimmies, removing her stockings, shoes, she flashes her breasts, which have tassels attached, which she then also removes. We have just been treated to a traditional striptease—or so we think. Suddenly, the camera pulls away, and a light begins to strobe as a smirking Ness removes her curly blond wig, revealing a bald head. She then slowly starts to remove all of her body parts, beginning with her legs. Ears, nose, head, breasts, arms: all are gingerly removed until she is only a torso floating in black space and then spinning off into a cosmic universe, full of stars. In the May/June 1974 issue of Canyon Cinemanews, Freude interviews Nelson about the film. What began for Nelson as an absurdity became a pointed political statement: “Women that perform in front of men to delight them usually become very hardened. Sometimes they really enjoy it, but a lot of them don’t. What I see in the stripper’s final gesture is, ‘you can have it all and see, I’m still me.’” Though Nelson points to the problematic of objectification by the striptease, she is also allowing for the striptease to be a self-expressive act, one not done solely for the viewing pleasure of men.
How might Freude’s initial curatorial selection read now with contemporary film additions? Though same-sex desire seems to be articulated in Virginia Giritlian’s Cumulus Nimbus and Penelope Spheeris’ I Don’t Know, films that take a more definitive, or declarative, stance on other kinds of women’s sexuality could better round out the program. Restaging the program with Dyketactics would allow us to further reflect on Freude’s original intent of exploring sexual identity and representation—something I propose to do here by comparing Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974) and Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1967).
A Hypothetical Pairing: Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1967) and Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974)
A labor of love in all ways, Carolee Schneemann’s 16mm film Fuses (1967) took over three years to produce. It is a carefully crafted response to Stan Brakhage’s film Window Water Baby Moving (1963), about the birth of Stan and Jane Brakhage’s first child, and Loving (1959), which features scenes of Schneemann and partner James Tenney making love. Reference is also made to Brakhage’s Cat’s Cradle (1959), which features rapid editing, collage, flashes of sex between a man and a woman, a cat and the mirroring and inversion of images—all filmic devices that Schneemann incorporates into Fuses.
The film was shot over many seasons from 1964 to 1967. It is marked by fleeting but fluidly woven impressions of lovemaking, oral sex, the moments in between, facial expressions, Schneemann running on a beach, her cat Kitsch, the snowy outside from the interior of a car, a Christmas tree, a window, curtains, and night scenes filmed on the highway. It begins with a densely painted title leader crediting Schneemann, James Tenney, and Kitsch. There is no sync sound—only silence. Each shot of their foreplay and sex is fragmented, not in the expected order of foreplay, penetration and climax. The editing stays close to actual experience: stopping and starting, changing positions, engaging in different activities. The perspective from which we are privy to their experience varies as well. Schneemann alternately holds the camera herself while engaged in sex, props it up above, beside and behind herself and Tenney. Moments shot at other times and places are interspersed as well, introducing the idea that there is a relationship outside of the sexual component between Schneemann and Tenney. He touches her chin, lifting it up so that she smiles and looks into his eyes, a moment of non-sexual intimacy. The speed of the film is fast at points and then languishes in others. Body parts emerge from shadows: legs, backs, feet, arms, and torsos, leaving the viewer to fill in the missing visual details. Bathed in yellow light streaming in from the window, curtains gently blowing, the image lingers and then goes black.
Though sexually explicit, Fuses is anti-pornographic in the sense that Freude characterizes it: that is, against a picturing of women as consumable sexualized object solely for male pleasure. Deliberately, Schneemann has inserted her own pleasure as the beginning of the film, not the end. By being both the artist and actor—creator and participant—Schneemann closes the objectification loop. She is the bearer of her own image, the producer of the visual representation of her own body. She retains this control, in contrast to Jane Brakhage in Window Water Baby Moving or herself in Loving. Jane’s endurance throughout the childbirth process is certainly treated with awe, but the distance of Brakhage from his subject is felt. For Schneemann, this distance between filmmaker and subject is something she identifies as inequality and remedies in Fuses.
Like Fuses, Barbara Hammer’s short 16mm film, Dyketactics (1974), operates in an explicitly sexualized space. In Fuses, Schneemann engages with the ocean and waves; in Dyketactics, Hammer and other women bond in a meadow, by the river, and indoors for scenes of lesbian touching, socializing, and sex. Both films use the imagery of the natural world to draw out the fluidity of sex and life. Filming their surroundings also serve, as mentioned earlier, to disrupt explicit sexuality in explicating its complexity, making the film more about the entirety of intimate experience and not just the sex acts. Like Schneemann, Hammer incorporates montage editing, in various indoor and outdoor settings, in a variety of camera perspectives. The film starts out with the title, Dyketactics, filmed being painted in white paint, in capital letters, onto a rocky earth bank. By painting the letters on a literal ‘dyke,’ Hammer humorously reclaims the term from its negative connotations, firmly situating it within her own sex and female-positive narrative. Unlike Fuses, the film has a soundtrack: spacey and dissociative, a keyboard being played key by key in a sort of banal but bizarre and painstakingly slow melody. Hammer is trying to hint at a sense of discovery, the notes meandering and tentative. Nude women dance and cavort in a grassy meadow, bathe each other in river water, and lounge in the sun. It’s not a stretch to see why her work has been called romantic (or “optimistic,” as B. Ruby Rich has called her work, a term I prefer). But this is an over-simplification, glossing over the lack of lesbian images that were available at the time of the film’s production, not to mention the ubiquitous use of nature images in experimental film of this time.
In contrast to Schneemann, Hammer’s sex scenes were filmed in collaboration with a third party, Cris Saxton, not engaged in the sexual encounter. Hammer has certainly proved herself capable of filming while doing a variety of tasks in her other films, but it seems that the point of invoking another woman as the cameraperson was to get a more complete vision of lesbian sex, non-obscured, and not secret. While there are certainly close-ups and pans of both Hammer and her partner’s bodies, the sexual experience is less protracted than in Fuses. The film ends on the women’s naked bodies caressing each other, and we get the sense that this is somehow new, or different, and poignantly framed as such.
In the analysis of the film, I think it’s important to note that Hammer didn’t come out as a lesbian until she was in her thirties. It definitely alters how Dyketactics is perceived; she is exploring herself as much as she is presenting herself. Hammer recalls in her autobiography, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, “The 70s was for me a time of locating filmic identity (my own) in lesbian/feminist content.” For Hammer, Dyketactics was her coming out vehicle.
A lesbian film artist births herself. There are no examples of lesbian filmmakers who identify themselves publicly as lesbians in the past. I was proselytizing my newfound place, my lesbian homeland.5
What is also of note is that the sex between Hammer and Asher is staged. Hammer notes, “explicit sexuality was not the moving internal force of Dyketactics. Sensual imagery that evoked physical sensations in the audience was its basic aesthetic principle.” Importantly, Dyketactics epitomizes what Hammer calls an active cinema, where the audience is engaged physically; “active cinema respects the physical and mental intelligence of its viewers by increasing rather than subduing self- awareness…[it is not] inaccessible to entrance…or intended to mystify.”6Dyketactics and Fuses register the liberation of women in a transitional moment in feminist discourse. Both feature an “erotic time that is edited kinesthetically…images were edited by and for the sense of touch.”7 Identity politics have acted as forces that have undeniably shaped how Hammer and Schneemann’s work and careers have been received and historicized. For Hammer, there is a clear intention to mark herself as a feminist lesbian maker: “my films made in the 70s, 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.”8 Fuses is similarly a feminist work in these sense that Schneemann actively asserts control of her own representation.
Conclusion: Naming and Suggestions for a Contemporary Screening of Freude’s Human Sexuality: Films by Women
If revisiting Freude’s film program today, in addition to adding a film like Dyketactics, I would also want to expand the exploration of sexuality to include a more intersectional and queered picturing of sensuality. For example, Liz Rosenfeld’s Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited) (2005) engages Hammer’s work in a way that advocates the visibility of queerness, updating Dyketactics by picturing notably queer bodies and an androgynous social space. Filmed by Rosenfeld in urban and rural areas of Chicago, this contemporary take reactivates a connection between the filmmaker and the filmmaker’s community, much as Hammer’s original did. Forgoing explicit sexuality for the more playful interactions of Hammer’s Dyketactics, various bodies in the film paint, wrap, and dance around each other. For Rosenfeld, Hammer’s work provided a jumping off point from which to facilitate and activate her own social spaces. In this way, Dyketactics still carries the active energies that imbue it with potential for reinterpretation.
Curating, as the example of Freude demonstrates, is and has always been an actively political position. As curator Lowry Stokes Simms and the late curator Marcia Tucker (founder of the New Museum) state in !W.A.R.: Women Art Revolution (2010): “the curatorial department is where you want to be because you can actually have power.” Staging Freude’s film program today would offer the possibility of reactivating a specific moment in 1970s Bay Area feminist cultural memory. Freude’s selection is marked by a particular but fluid identity politic, one that is actually quite current and unmarred by the rhetoric of her time. Freude’s idea of a feminist identity politic can thus be seen to offer a useful way to intentionally prioritize and curate the feminist, lesbian, and queer art and film of today.
 
Susannah Magers is an Oakland-based curator and writer. Recent experience includes curating at Rochester Art Center, in MN, and serving as Interpretation Manager for @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Magers’ 2016 exhibition, Amanda Curreri: The Calmest of Us Would Be Lunatics, was presented on a panel during Open Engagement 2016—POWER, at the Oakland Museum of California. A former co-director of Oakland project space Royal NoneSuch Gallery, she holds a dual BA in Art and History from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Current projects include working with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives (BALA) and Sinister Wisdom, an intersectional lesbian-focused journal for which she is guest-editing an upcoming issue of the journal on the theme of transfer in contemporary art. She is co-curating a forthcoming exhibition on queer futurity at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.
 
              
            

              

                                
On February 13, 2017 Barbara Hammer sat for an interview with Tonya Zimbardo at the Owsley Brown Presents offices in San Francisco, California. They discussed Hammer’s early years as a filmmaker, moving to San Francisco as well as her activism as a pioneering lesbian filmmaker.
 

 
A special thank you to Barbara Hammer, Tanya Zimbardo, Kathleen Maguire, and the Owsley Brown Presents team (Anne Flatte, Lauren Veen, Tina Tom and Owsley Brown).
              
            

              

                                
Canyon Cinema 50 launched its local programming with Barbara Hammer in person presenting a program of expanded cinema works. The Changing the Shape of Film event took place on Thursday, February 16th, 2017 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.