philoSOPHIA

Agnès Varda and Barbara Hammer were born a decade apart—Varda in 1928, the beginning of the sound era in cinema, and Hammer in the United States in 1939, the beginning of the Second World War. The momentous events in the world and the world of cinema that coincide with their births echo the impact each made in their decades-long careers as filmmakers. As Varda put it, her work reflects the idea of:

a single person’s creative life across half a century that saw the Cuban revolution, the Chinese revolution, the Black Panthers, the evolution of birth control—major social changes. […] and also the growth of popular theater and the Nouvelle Vague/New Wave. It’s my trajectory through public events, either by chance, by affection, [or] by political conviction.¹

As such, their oeuvres offer a unique glimpse into the ways in which female artists both contributed and responded to the changing tides of feminist thought. Each artist pushed the boundaries of her primary artistic medium of film to ref lect her unique experience—a woman’s experience—of the world. When they died within two weeks of each other this past March 2019, they each left behind an extraordinary and expansive body of work as well as an indelible mark on film history. In August–September 2019, the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival paid tribute to their work and featured a retrospective of several of their films as well as a memorial lecture on their [End Page 107] contributions to film history, bringing these pioneering film artists into conversation. Each artist decisively expanded the purview and the way women have operated in the field of film production. In the wake of their loss, it is both fitting that their groundbreaking contributions receive commemoration and valorization, and illuminating to think of them in relation to each other.

Both women hailed from a generation emerging in the wake of feminist movements in Europe and the United States. Agnès Varda’s career began first: she made her first film in the mid-1950s as a young woman of twenty-six. Perhaps in part because she started out as a photographer, she was keenly interested in exploiting the specific tools of the camera and of the documentary qualities it offered even when telling fictional stories. Throughout the course of her career, she used both actors and non-actors in her films and blended fiction and documentary on multiple levels; she reflected on the camera’s capture of lives in a meta-cinematic way, being aware of the kinds of mediation the cinema offers as a way of thinking through specific issues and ways of seeing the world. Varda’s films experiment with the traditions of cinema and delve into contemporary political issues. They address multiple art forms and disciplines, among them photography, sculpture, painting, literature, and the law.

Meanwhile, although Barbara Hammer was born in Los Angeles, California, her work could not be further from the glitz of the Hollywood studios in her childhood’s vicinity. After awakening in her late twenties to the realization that she was a lesbian, she left her husband and went back to school to learn filmmaking. After that, she was driven by a sense of discovery through the personal and expressive possibilities of cinema. Of that early time of her vocation, she has noted: “I was smitten with what I could do with [the camera], what it could record, the portability and, especially, the intimacy—how film could express who I am in a way I hadn’t yet found.”² In the early 1970s, during her schooling but outside of the actual classroom, she began to make a series of films that depicted women’s sexuality, bodies, and experience in a frank manner. She is best known for these films that put lesbians front and center and that experiment with the camera’s flexible language for expressing intimacy.

In many ways, Varda and Hammer could not be more different. Although she turned primarily to making feature-length documentaries in the last decades of her life...