A landmark of queer film that illustrates the invisibility of LGBTQ+ history, Barbara Hammer’s first feature Nitrate Kisses is paired with her playfully subversive short about the impact of technology on sexuality and emotion.
No No Nooky T.V. (1987): No No Nooky T.V. confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels, and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age. [12 min; experimental; English]
Nitrate Kisses (1992): Barbara Hammer’s documentary Nitrate Kisses confronts the historical erasure of queer sexuality through the frank embrace of sex as an act that is both liberating and political. [67 min; English]
“Barbara Hammer makes the invisible visible by rescuing and inventing lost images in Nitrate Kisses. At once sexy, erotic and confrontational, Hammer’s work operates at the margins between truth and fiction, memory and history, opening up a new conceptualization of LGBT+ biography and visual history.” – Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Senses of Cinema
“[Nitrate Kisses] is an act of preservation which remains enamored with both the form and its subjects, an exuberant reminder that even the most serious topics and histories benefit from love.” – Maximilien Luc Proctor, In Review Online
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