Double Strength, 1978

Transferred 16 mm film

The film intelligently explores new sound-image and image-image relations as it acknowledges and confronts the old problems of woman-to-woman relationships (specifically one between the filmmaker and a trapeze artist). The film parallels the different stages of the relationship, offering abstract views on the rewards of a longterm love while the actual communication between the two women is in process of breaking down. All the audio and visual clues for the demise are strong: busy signals and voices that say the number is disconnected, still photographs expressing rage, dissonant chords, a pulsating black-and-white face of one lover as a shocking backdrop for the movements of the other.

Barbara Hammer, Double Strengh, transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, sound, 14:03 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP

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Barbara Hammer, Double Strength, 1978, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, sound, 14:03 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP

Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, sound, 14:03 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP

Credits

Text: Andrea Weiss

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Estate of Barbara Hammer

**Blue Film No 6: Love Is Where You Find It, 1998**

**Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of Aids, 1986**

Biography

Barbara Hammer was born in Hollywood in 1939. Her documentary and experimental films are considered among the earliest and most extensive representations of lesbian identity, love, and sexuality. Accompanying her career as a filmmaker, Hammer has time and again worked with performance and installation. She has participated in group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial in 1993, the WACK! show at MOCA L.A. and MoMA PS1 in 2007/2008. With film retrospectives at New York’s MoMA in 2010 and the Tate Modern, London, in 2012, the artworld's interest in Hammer's work has recently increased. Hammer has been a teacher for many years and held a professorship at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee (CH). She died in 2019.

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