From His-story to Our Story In History Lessons, filmmaker Barbara Hammer looks at the way lesbians have been portrayed in film-and does some portraying of her own by Lauren Johnson

Barbara Hammer's History Lessons is not for the faint of heart ... nor the humorless ... nor the lazy. Don't expect to lie back and have the filmmaker tell you what she wants you to think about this collection of images strung together with wry humor and irony. History Lessons "is a compilation montage film of mostly male representation of lesbians from the beginning of film [1896 is the first clip] to Stonewall." By juxtaposing images, using dissolving and scarred footage, imperfect clips, and pieces of different times and places, Hammer comments on the fragmentation of lesbian history. The images are surprising; indeed, sometimes shocking, often funny, especially with the sly humor of the filmmaker always there in the presentation. By handing us a strung-together (in the best sense of the word) series of pictures from the past, pictures not meant to flatter or celebrate us, Hammer manages to create a new work that reminds us that no matter how few of us have ever seen the proof, the fact is, we've been here all along.

This interview was conducted via e-mail from Houston with the filmmaker in her home in New York City.

OutSmart: What was the genesis of History Lessons? Did it start with an idea, a collection of footage, another project?

Barbara Hammer: History Lessons is the third film in my trilogy on lesbian and gay histories: Nitrate Kisses in 1992, Tender Fictions in '95, and now History Lessons, in 2000. I began this trilogy in 1990 and spent 10 years on it because I think our history in film has been primarily missing. I wanted to suggest that history is a series of fragments, not a continuation of the lives of great men or great women. My ideas are to involve the audience in making the film, so I don't tie things neatly together with a voiceover explaining and experts declaiming. I trust my audience to be sophisticated media watchers and know that the film is more meaningful to them when they make the decisions of what images mean, how they are combined, the significance of silences and disintegrating film clips. If our history is one of lack, of disintegration, due to the social injustices we have suffered, why shouldn't the form of the film reflect this? In fact, form is content. A lesbian form is a radical form.

The footage you use, where did it come from? How does one go about looking for lesbian images on film?

Instead of looking for images made by men-as most of the images in History Lessons are-I looked for the lesbian archivist. These women had been collecting for years either in archives that they worked for or in old books and magazine shops. Szu Burgess fits the later description and Ann Maguire, the former. When I walked into the Rick Prelinger Archives [editor's note: the Prelinger Archives was once the largest privately held collection of 20th-century American advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films]-now sold to the National Archive of the United States, meaning all images are in the public domain-I met Ann Maguire who had been taping on the side all the films she thought could be interpreted as "lesbian." She is the goddess-send of this film!

Juxtaposing images is a technique that works throughout the film. Can you talk a bit about that technique and how you think we, the audience, respond to it?

I love montage as a form of critique and wit. Since most of the images made by men for men were negative [toward lesbians], I tried to reclaim them through irony. By reshaping and interrupting, disrupting the negativity we emerge as powerful creators. You the audience make the film every bit as much as me the filmmaker as you are making meaning with every edit, sound conjunction, or disjunction.

I find the film "liberating" in the sense that it opens the subject and the material up to new interpretations. There is a subversive element to that-implying a second level of meaning that "normal" society would miss. Can you talk a bit about yourself as a "subversive" filmmaker-do you see yourself that way at all?

Definitely. I am chuckling as I read your question. I never want to fit into any norm and find the socialization process of middle America most devitalizing. Undercut the images with sarcasm, irony, and wit! Unravel webs of distortion! Be free to cut and move from image bank to image bank as the impulse moves you. Take chances and risks and move the lesbian culture forward. Don't settle nor even attempt a Hollywood-like big budget film that removes directional grassroots controls and plays to audience sympathies and pocketbooks. Live a life of more austerity for the bountiful pleasure of freedom in creating. Manifesto, yes! Go Grrllls!

Can you talk a bit about the responses you have gotten to the film thus far from different groups? Lesbians? Straight folks? The film community? The academic community? Anybody else?

History Lessons was theatrically released, which in itself is a miracle. However, these images, unseen until this day and especially in this form, made First Run Features believe that there were enough people to make this a viable project. [In June, History Lessons was] released in DVD where I think it will have its most success. You can study the film, you can go back to read Colonized Lesbian Body, and see a photo gallery of pics related but not used in the film.

Audience reactions have been mixed. The premiere in San Francisco at the Castro to a sold-out crowd of 12,00 was exciting. I received the Frameline Award that year for making a significant contribution to lesbian cinema so I was a bit nervous and unable to truly give a good overall response to the audience reaction. However, I can say that there were clusters of women who got the irony-I could hear from their laughter-and then other sections of silence where clearly the humor was not shared.

I think this audience reflects the general experiences I have had, with the exception of Seoul, Korea, where the more newly fledged feminist and lesbian audience wasn't ready for the explicit pornography in the film, even with the reclaiming of it. Some women were quite shocked and even hurt to see these films. I think that even if the images are hurtful we need to look at them, not avoid them, critique and eventually even play with them.

The title History Lessons appears to imply that we should be learning something from the film. Is that true? What should we be learning from these history lessons you give us?

Chuckle, again. If there is an educational lesson in the film, it is to empower the audience to be their own [film]makers. In fact we can reflect on our participation in theaters that we are always taking in the information, processing it, and forming our opinions. In this case, History Lessons, even more so than a straight and narrow film that leads you down the path for its own objective (either monetary or political). If we don't become active citizens taking and demanding our civil liberties and rights, we are lost and subsumed in a capitalistic society that will use our energies but never repay us equally for our contributions. Therefore, take power, disrupt the existing systems, and through it all, enjoy and pleasure ourselves in the process.

History lies in so many disjointed patterns-trash, burnt ashes, crumpled notebooks, snapshots deteriorating, a love letter here and a note of despair there. History is to be made by the people who can read the specific culture of their own background. What would a nail clipper mean to a straight man or woman?

I hope that History Lessons empowers each viewer to claim their own personal life as history either through writing, filming, painting, talking. Let the angel of history fly over us, inspiring us to live to our fullest as creative lesbian beings.