One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. The series Ways of Seeing with Barbara Hammer starts on MUBI on March 8, 2021 in many countries.
A hand paints the last white letter of the word "Dyketactics" on a crumbling concrete façade and then we’re off to the races. For nearly two minutes the film pulsates in a kaleidoscopic montage of dyke imagery: naked women laying in the grass, striking poses in fields, bare feet walking over fallen leaves, Barbara Hammer photographing her own naked body and laughing, fruit, lizards, and bodies comingling before a burnt orange color fills the frame. A breath before dissolving into the rest of the film. Within this collage is a brief shot composed of a double exposure. On the left and right sides of the frame are women’s nude torsos in the grass. In the center is a closeup of Hammer’s face while driving a car. She has just pulled a vibrator up from her crotch and smells it, smiling at the camera. The images mutate into each other for only a brief second. The golden grass and sunlit pubes blend with the wisps of Hammer’s hair in the wind. It’s a celebration of the erotic in daily life; its political defiance marked by the boundless joy that radiates from a film with an intentionally militant title. Hammer is not just bringing dyke sex into the daylight, but playfully experimenting with a dyke way of seeing the world. The shot, like the rest of the film and much of Hammer’s work, interlaces a celebration of women’s bodies in nature with dyke lust and pleasure. Echoes of Brakhage and Mekas radiate from Hammer’s home movie intimacy—the shot of Hammer smiling at the camera is a glimpse of a family vacation on 8mm. But simultaneously Dyketactics evokes the hardcore loops of the 1970s porno theaters. The double exposure of the shot erodes the bifurcations between the avant-garde and the hardcore; between what’s considered respectable cinema and what’s not. Dyketactics is not unlike it’s gay hardcore contemporaries, the films of Wakefield Poole and Fred Halsted. Both are a blending of nonfiction, experimentation, theater, and pornography to forge a gay and lesbian cinematic language, a language that reflects the mundane and erotic multitudes of queer existence. Hammer’s double exposed shot contains an entire lesbian cosmos within its frame—a lesbian space that is at once psychological, symbolic, and an actuality of documented life. Maya Deren, Hammer’s great influence to which she constantly paid homage, made films about women restlessly searching for their own spaces. Dyketactics begins with having already found it.