Generations

Synopsis

A collaborative 16mm film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Barbara Hammer, 70 years old, hands the camera off to Gina Carducci, a young queer filmmaker. Shooting during the last days of Coney Island’s Astroland amusement park in New York, the filmmakers find that the inevitable fact of aging echoes in the architecture of the space age themed park and in the emulsion of the film medium itself. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s film Bridges Go Round, both filmmakers edited picture and sound separately, joining their films in the middle when they finished, making a true generational experiment.

Director Biography

Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video. She has made over 80 moving image works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. In 2013 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a film Waking Up Together on the poet Elizabeth Bishop. She was awarded the same year a Marie Walsh Sharpe artist studio to work on performance projection.