NITRATE KISSES

Director Barbara Hammer / 1992 / USA

For many years filmmaker Barbara Hammer has been creating provocative, often experimental, imagery. In this, her first feature documentary, she has assembled an intense and exceptionally vital collage which relates a history which has heretofore been repressed or distorted. In 1990 she discovered — in the Eastman film archive — what must be one of the earliest gay films, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber's Lot in Sodom (1933). Utilising outakes and clips, interwoven with an assortment of other materials, including footage from German narrative feature films from the thirties, interviews, optically treated surfaces and shots of three separate couples making love, she offers a different set of images about lesbian and gay life than those which have previously emerged. In so doing, she not only challenges the dominant ideology of the heterosexual society, but confronts powerfully and graphically our images of sexual and erotic love

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