"The Female Closet" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL This week I have had the pleasure of previewing a new documentary film by the legendary lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Though you won't be able to go out and see it tonight at your local cineplex, you will have the opportunity to see it in a few weeks at the 9th annual Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, coming up October 2--11. The film is called "The Female Closet." Barbara Hammer's recent films, including "Nitrate Kisses" (1993) and "Tender Fictions" (1995), are what you might call "avant garde documentaries." They combine Hammer's enormously inventive use of experimental filmmaking techniques with a narrative, however complex and non linear, that makes them more accessible to a general audience than much of her earlier, more visually abstract, work is. Hence, for the last few years, her films have been showing up on the film festival circuit where she has been showered with well-deserved awards and honors. One of the things I love about Barbara Hammer's films is that they always surprise me in various delightful ways and I always learn new things from them. Though I would hesitate to use the word "straight" to refer to Barbara Hammer in any way, "The Female Closet" is, somewhat surprisingly, more of a straight documentary than any of the other films of hers I've seen. It's the most accessible of the recent string of documentaries by far, and it is a superb lesson on the history of lesbian art, as it interrogates the relationships between "the closet" and lesbian artists over the last hundred years. The film focuses on three women artists: the late 19th C. American photographer Alice Austen; the German collage artist Hannah Hoch who was part of the Dada movement and the Berlin art scene of the 1920s and early '30s; and contemporary New York lesbian artist Nicole Eisenman. In each case we see not only a wide variety of examples of their work, but also commentary from various people who have studied their work and their personal lives, and in the case of Nicole Eisenman who is very much alive, commentary from the artist as well. The Alice Austen segment catapults us directly into a recent controversy between the Board of Trustees of the Alice Austen House and Museum on Staten Island where Alice apparently has been treated as a local icon for some time. Presumably in an effort to protect the "reputation" of their Alice, the board refused to allow scholars who wanted to explore the question of Austen's sexuality to see materials in their collection. There is even a suggestion that some of the materials that might have revealed information about her sexuality were removed. All this earned the Alice Austen House a raucous visit from the Lesbian Avengers that Hammer captures on film. Even without the help of the museum, Austen's sexuality seems pretty clear. She and her women friends eschewed the company of men and even formed a club called "The Darns" (as in "darn those women who won't date men), they often cross dressed in male clothing, and many of Austen's photographs are, to say the least, gender-bending. She and her friend Gertrude Tate lived together in Staten Island for fifty-five years, and many of their surviving relatives say that it was what we would today call a lesbian relationship, even though they might not have used just those words to describe themselves. So in Austen's case, the closet made her silent on the question of her sexual orientation but the times allowed her to live her life with her lover; now the battle rages between those in denial who want to keep Alice in her proper Victorian closet and those who recognize her as a foresister. Hannah Hoch, coming of age in the free and open atmosphere of the 1920s seems clearly to have been a bisexual woman who had three major relationships in her life. She was part of the Dada movement from its outset and was seen as the girlfriend of one of the male members of the group. Then she spend twelve years as the partner of Dutch woman poet Til Brugen. Living first in The Netherlands and later in Berlin, where there was a major gay and lesbian subculture in the twenties, meant that they did not have to be in the closet. Hoch's work often plays with the permutations of gender and many of her images are of highly androgynous figures. Nonetheless, museums such as the Museum of Modern Art are reluctant to identify Hoch as a bisexual artist, and Hammer explores how knowing or not knowing this fact about her life affects the way people perceive her work. Once she and Til parted, Hannah went on to marry a man and live out her days in a seemingly traditional heterosexual marriage. Of course the advent of Nazism might have had a lot to do with that choice, since other choices would have been taboo. Hammer's treatment of Nicole Eisenman is, perhaps, the most interesting of all. Here's an absolutely out lesbian artist from New York's East Village art scene who came to prominence in the "lesbian chic" period of the 1980s. They explore how her Scarsdale upbringing required her to be closeted as a teen, but she burst out of the closet as an adult and never looked back. She also plunged into the drug scene that was part of the art scene in the East Village, and has spent the last few years recovering from that. I loved the various ways Hammer deals cinematically with this aspect of Nicole's life. I also loved the dynamic technique that Hammer develops to display Eisenman's dynamic style of working. It appears that she spent hours filming Nicole's every mark or brush stroke on the canvas and then edited it down to a quick montage of the changing images on the canvas--so quick it's almost like animation--and we get to see the images growing and changing before our very eyes. I knew Barbara Hammer couldn't do a straight documentary -- her own artistic inventiveness is simply too great merely to show us talking heads and archival stills. Remember the title "The Female Closet" and go see it during the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (or your local L/G/B festival if you can't make it to Tampa in October. For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1998 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduce this review without the permission of the author: mcalister@chuma1.cas.usf.edu.