This essay analyzes Barbara Hammer's 1974 experimental nonfiction film Jane Brakhage . Both an homage and a rebuttal to the many films of Jane Brakhage made by her husband, Stan Brakhage, Hammer's film gives Jane the voice she never had in Stan's work. The article contextualizes Jane Brakhage 's production at a moment when competing strands of feminist thought took different approaches to the fraught topic of nature. Hammer's films were criticized as essentialist by feminists in the 1980s, but this essay argues that Jane Brakhage complicates that reading of Hammer's work. The film documents Jane's creative life in the mountains, but critiques the limitations of her role as a heterosexual wife and mother. By locating this short film within a larger genealogy of feminist and environmental thought, we can better appreciate the extent to which Hammer's films explore the feminist and queer potential of nature.

This article is an homage to two powerful women who were lost to us in 2019, as this journal issue was under way. Feminist film pioneers and superstars Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann were both interviewed by Alexandra Juhasz for her Women of Vision project in the late 1990s. In 2017, now both approaching eighty years of age, both were enjoying major retrospectives in New York, and so Juhasz interviewed them again. In this text, Juhasz intercuts the four conversations, conducted over the course of twenty-five years, in an intergenerational, time-traveling retrospective in which Hammer and Schneemann comment on their own former and current laments and visions for the future.

This essay investigates the ways in which Barbara Hammer’s film Nitrate Kisses (1992) traces stories about homosexuality throughout the twentieth century. Inspired both by the concept of “vertical cinema,” as theorized by Maya Deren, and by the historical-philosophical reflections of Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin, Hammer realizes a montage process in Nitrate Kisses that resurrects a forgotten historical memory through the juxtaposition of archival materials and original images. It is a memory that is reappropriated through the film as an experiential, tactile, and emotional moment.