Claude Cahun and
Marcel Moore,
still from, Lover Other, by Barbara Hammer

Mouchette, 1920s Bordeaux, France,
still from, History Lessons, by Barbara Hammer

Lover Other and
My Love of Filmmaking

By Barbara Hammer

Lover Other continues my work on uncovering choices made by artists and Resisters during war (Matisse/Bonnard in Resisting Paradise, 2003) and foregrounds the creative and heroic work of two forgotten lesbian artists, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, while at the same time challenging the traditional genre of documentary filmmaking.

With the new acceptance of documentary as both vital and entertaining and with box office receipts supporting commercial theatrical releases more and more, there is still something missing. What? The emergence of daring work that resifts and questions the literal composition of homogenous “reality.” There are new ways to tell stories, and audiences are hungry for
creative and fresh approaches.

As a completely free and independent film artist I accept the challenge to expand the genre into multi-faceted notions of truths, always giving the viewer credit for intelligence and perception. I work with the material that I find and create to make the most innovative piece possible. As an artist I can’t nor do I wish to follow a formula. Everything must be created new and each new subject given its own documentary performance, a film performance called forth by the found material itself.

When I was working on Resisting Paradise, my 2003 documentary that questions what artists do during a time of war and focuses on artists and Resisters of WWII who worked near Cassis, France, I tried to find a lesbian or gay man who was also a resister. As a lesbian filmmaker and an as an artist, I wanted to find a lesbian Resister. People told me that during the war one didn’t think about sexual preference, but only about saving lives. I remembered coming across the photographs of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore at Hotel Sully in Paris in 1988, but since my film was centered on Cassis and the Mediterranean coast, I couldn’t include them. However, I could focus on their artistic lives and heroic, incredible acts of creative resistance to the Nazi occupation of Jersey during WWII in my next film, Lover Other.

It has been a privilege to work with the archival photographs, writings and graphic illustrations of these two women. I have found making the film challenging. A story of two Surrealist artists should not be told in strictly linear fashion, as that style would destroy the aesthetics of Surrealism. But the film needs to be accessible to an audience or it won’t be seen. This has been both my struggle and my delight during the two years of making Lover Other.

Claude Cahun born Lucie Schwob (1894-1954) and Marcel Moore born Suzanne Malherbe (1892-1972) fell into complete obscurity at the onset of WWII and the circumstances of their life and work remain essentially unknown today. Their photographs of Claude—bald, cross-dressed, and brazen—confuse gender roles showing risk and daring. In the film the actors Kathleen Chalfant and Marty Pottenger perform a recently discovered script with erotic overtones from the artists’ archive and lesbian identity as well as Surrealist collaboration is surmised and celebrated by current art historians and whispered by scandalized past neighbors.

Born to a wealthy intellectual French Jewish family, Lucie Schwob changed her name to one of indeterminate gender, Claude Cahun. Her half-sister, Suzanne Malherbe, artist and illustrator, also adopted a masculine name, Marcel Moore. Claude began a lifelong pursuit of self- portraiture and female identity using masks, disguise, and masquerade through photographs taken by Moore.

As some of the few women artists in the Parisian Surrealist group led by Breton they occupied a difficult position. Cahun published her anti-autobiography Aveux non avenus (Cancelled Confessions) in 1930 with photomontages by herself and Moore.

Claude and Marcel fled France in the late 1930's to live in exile at their home on the Isle of Jersey. The Nazis invaded Jersey as a stepping stone to England. Olive Thompson’s home movie from the period shows Germans playing on the beach, marching, and local Jersey folks queuing for food in a time of near-starvation.

The lesbian sisters became Resisters making written notes, some-
times with drawings, in German and Croatian to inspire mutiny among the German troops on Jersey. These notes were tossed into the cars of the occupying forces or stuffed into the pockets of German soldiers.

Both women were arrested and unsuccessfully attempted suicide while in prison. The Gestapo sentenced them to death in 1944. Belza Greene, a Jersey Resister, was in the cell next to them and heard the suicide attempt. During their imprisonment (July 25, 1944-May 8, 1945), their home was searched and looted several times. A German officer’s diary speaks of the intimate and sexual photographs found in their home and subsequently destroyed in the raid. An essential part of Cahun/ Moore’s photographic works and archives were irretrievably lost.

The Jersey bailiff refused to put the women to death. Allied forces liberated the island and release the women whose health had suffered. Cahun/Moore continue to make photographs as they aged until Cahun’s death ten years later in 1954.

“To mirror, to fix, these are the words that have no meaning here”; “Under the mask is another mask, I will never finish lifting all these faces”.

—Claude Cahun

Hammer has just returned from premiering Lover Other in Bratislava
and Budapest. Lover Other will be the first film kicking off MOMA’s Directors’ Fortnight festival on Feb. 4, 2006, at 8pm. And subsequently a week’s run at Two Boots Cinema in NYC. The film has been accepted for the Berlin Film Festival in the spring of 2006. Hammer also creates 2-dimensional work. She participated in the LLGAF Marry Me exhibition, Nov.–Dec., 2004. Read more about Barbara on her website http://www.barbarahammerfilms.com, and the WCSU site http://people.wcsu.edu/mccarneyh/fva/H/BHammer_bio.html.

Barbara Hammer

Barbara Hammer: A Brief Bio
By Helene Dacey and Jaime Rodrigue

Barbara Hammer (1939– ) is an artist in the field of experimental films, as well as an activist in the gay and lesbian community, and she is known for being the most creative lesbian filmmaker in the world. Over the past 30+ years Barbara Hammer has created over 75 films. Hammer is known for using various formats ranging from short to feature films, hand- painted to scratch films, the use of the optical printer, and computer-generated films.

Known for creating films dealing with women’s issues on gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family, she is well known for her film Nitrate Kisses, which fearlessly broke two taboos by showing older lesbians in extended erotic embrace, all in richly detailed black and white. This film won
the Audience Award for Best Documentary in 1993.

One of her goals was to create an autobiography before anyone else wrote her biography and that is exactly what she did in the film Tender Fictions. Tender Fictions is a playful, imaginative, penetrating description of an artist’s life. The film is a great example of Hammer’s techniques and use of scratchy home movies, snapshots, overdubs from academic texts, interviews, skewed television programs, and reminiscences of her family and friends and a string of ex-girlfriends. In 2000 she made her first digital video documentary, Devotion, a historical investigation of a Japanese documentary filmmaking collective.

Hammer received a master’s degree in film from San Francisco University and studied multimedia digital studies at the American Film Institute. She also holds a degree in psychology from UCLA.

In 2001-2002 Hammer was a Radcliffe Institute fellow, where she worked on the 16mm feature documentary film, Resisting Paradise, about artists and Resisters in the south of France during WW2. The film challenges viewers to confront the question: How can art exist during a time of political crisis?

—excerpted from the Film and Video Arts website of the Theater Arts Dept., Western Connecticut State University,
maintained by Hugh McCarney.