The Hungry Heart: Barbara Hammer at BAM
Last night I attended a screening of “Audience” at BAM, part of Mix NYC’s “Barbara Hammer: Through the Eyes of Others” programming. Shot in 1982, the film is a briskly edited 32-minute compilation-style document of Hammer talking to people about her avant-garde, lesbian-centric movies before and after they’ve experienced them.
In San Francisco, she interviews people waiting in line outside the theater, sometimes while she’s wearing a high-cheekboned mask and voluminous wig, a garish manifestation of idealized feminine beauty. In Britain, she conducts informal post-screening Q&As, inviting viewers to share their reactions. Hammer’s manner throughout is frank and jaunty, her personality is immense, and if there are boundaries between subject and interlocutor, she’s the one who decides where they are. She kisses a respondent on the mouth in one scene and keeps her distance, emotional and physical, from another who seems just a bit too keen.
The camerawork is especially compelling. Like Hammer herself, it hungrily searches for meaningful connection. Framing is often tight and loose, cutting off a forehead or losing focus as it zooms in while a person speaks. The camera sees the way we might—or, rather, how Hammer does—noticing everything, getting ultra close so as not to miss any detail or quirk. The effect is neither graphic nor stylized. It’s just curious. Genuinely and omnivorously curious.
Viewed in 2026, when cameras are present in all aspects of life, from the Rings that watch over our doorstep to the cellphones for which we perform our lives, “Audience” is almost quaint in its innocence. Hammer’s outsized charm, at times bordering on the hammy, overwhelms and intimidates many of the people we see her interview. That, along with her relative starpower as an artist of note plus the presence of the camera, makes them shy and tentative. Their answers are thoughtful and unpolished, at times imperfect or even beside the point. But Hammer listens to all of it with equal interest and intensity. In “Audience,” sincerity has its day.
