Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on International Women's Day, and tap dances on Shirley Temple's star on Hollywood Boulevard. This child movie star was the ideal by which Hammer's ambitious mother measured her own Barbie. Grandma, already a cook for Lillian Gish in Hollywood, introduced the cute, loquacious child and her mother to D.W. Griffith. Lesbian autobiography is a slender genre, so Hammer draws from general culture studies for critique and to provide an ironic edge to the synthesized "voices of authority".

Hammer’s 2003 film Resisting Paradise, which deals with the concept of art as a tool of political resistance, was especially fascinating to me. Hammer, who was doing a painting residency in Cassis, France, when war broke out in Kosovo, found herself questioning the validity of art in the face of political conflict and unrest. She began exploring the history of the French Resistance in Cassis, and used that as a chance to reflect on how Cassis’ artistic community, both those who were threatened by the Nazi occupation of France and those who were able to remain relatively neutral, reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War.

既是女同志與女性主義實驗電影的先驅，芭芭拉漢瑪也是美國最前衛的獨立女性製片人。毫無掩飾地直拍身體隱私與性愛親密、反思性別，為在社會隱形的酷兒書寫一頁歷史，甚至在生命最後階段創作自己死亡的藝術。對於這樣一號人物，一切皆不足為外人道。奧康納就讓本尊親述所思所想，以她所拍的影像，包括《女同志戰術》及成名作《硝酸鹽之吻》等，呈現其人其藝。漢瑪希望作品超越自己生命，奧康納代她完成了一篇漂亮的藝術宣言。柏林泰迪熊獎最佳紀錄片。

Welcome To This House, a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop, is about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full lesbian disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop's best loved homes in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil, believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends,and scholars provide missing documents of numerous female lovers. Bishop's intimate poems and the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara bring the poet into our lives with new facts and unexpected details.

Barbara Hammer’s Audience (1981) is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking.

Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.