Barbara Hammer's Jane Brakhage

Abstract

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.

Hélène Cixous, Laida Lertxundi, and the Fruits of the Feminine

“…Whether fruit for women is erotic, painterly or writerly, thinking women with fruit can be disturbing and vexing-especially in a contemporary feminist context. When it comes to women and nature, accusations of determinism abound [6] 1 . Some women, as we have seen and will continue to see, take fruit for the page or the screen nonetheless.…”

“…One bunch has been placed in the foreground of a mountain in Footnotes to a House of Love. Another, in Utskor (2013), is placed on a nice cool windowsill in Northern Norway, beside three lemons on a table 6 . Someone in Utskor removes the bananas from the frame, but the lemons remain.…”

“…1 Accusations tend to come after so-called 'second wave' feminism in particular. For further discussion of these issues in relation to experimental film and feminism of the 1970s, see [6]. Writing of landscape filmmaking, P. Adams Sitney notes the 'devouring subjectivity' of Stan Brakhage, whose 'near-solipsism' eclipses or towers over the natural world-there is something of this danger, I think, in women taking fruit as metaphors for the female body.…”