Across nearly fifty years, Barbara Hammer produced a pathbreaking body of feminist filmmaking that forever transformed how sexuality, selfhood, community, and history could be explored through cinema. Finally, in Sarah Keller’s passionate and erudite monograph, we have a comprehensive, inspiring guide to the achievements of an artist whose relevance continues to burn bright.
~Erika Balsom, reader in film studies, King’s College London
Keller’s book is a celebration of Hammer’s work, both comprehensive and incisive.
~W. A. Vincent, Choice
Because Keller’s primary focus rests on the longitudinal evolution of Hammer’s expression and her development of the technical skills needed to bring that expression to the screen, this book will be most useful to critics, theorists, and historians of film, as well as graduate students in training for those specializations.
~Timothy John Hodgdon, Journal of Popular Culture
Keller’s book resonates with this artistic and critical openness, while remaining attentive to how Hammer’s practice, theory and activism were at the leading edge of moves towards diversifying modes of cinematic engagement and activating the bodily and sensory realms of cinema experience.
~Jeffrey Geiger, Screen
Sarah Keller's stature as a preeminent critical historian of experimental film and media is extended in her expansive analysis of Barbara Hammer's films and writings. Barbara Hammer challenges our understanding of the history of experimental film, feminist theory, and lesbian and queer art through Keller's insightful validation of Hammer's critical curiosity and joy.
~Michael Zryd
Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out the Frame is not only a timely celebration of the life and work of a beloved foundational figure of Queer Cinema but also a necessary revision of the importance of Hammer's pre- and post-1970s expanded practice to the art world and to contemporary understandings of sexuality, embodiment, and media.
~Rebecca A. Sheehan
Meticulously researched, gorgeously illustrated, and comprehensively covering Barbara Hammer's extensive body of films, as well as its wide-ranging treatment by Hammer and others, Sarah Keller's Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame celebrates a lesbian feminist career and legacy that, while diverse and adaptive, always evidences Hammer's credo: 'Art is Energy!' With tender attention to many of Hammer's 100+ films as well as her copious and careful archives, Keller allow us time to sit with this oeuvre, built and enjoyed over decades, while unobtrusively making her own claims—in conversation with Hammer—about feminist, queer, and experimental cinema, as well as feminist and lesbian art, history, and archives. Drawing on Hammer's creative output across decades, themes, and artistic approaches, Keller provides new shape to Hammer's definitive 'eclectic curiosity and roving interests,' her 'radical openness,' and her 'medium promiscuity,' as she takes up a range of radical forms to make visible her radical concerns: with self (and other); the female body, sexuality, and illness; queer and lesbian identity, community, and interactivity; and cinema and archival form and herstory. Hammer's powerful commitments also include feminist, lesbian, and queer legacy, including her own. 'You want a book? You ask for it,' she informed Keller in a late-life interview. Keller delivers, and how.
~Alexandra Juhasz
Sarah Keller's landmark study arrives just in time to help us come to terms with the cessation of Hammer's extraordinary creative output. From Dyketactics, Hammer's legendary 'lesbian commercial' of 1974, to Evidentiary Bodies, the installation exploring living with terminal cancer made just before her death in 2019, the filmmaker experienced her creativity and connection with viewers urgently. Keller's sensitive critical writing illuminates that project with a generosity and openness that honor Hammer's passion.
~Patricia White
