‘Barbara Forever’ review: Hammer put her whole self on screen

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Like the Marines, great artists don’t really die, they just endure through new waves of admirers.

That sense of a body of art, one with an endless capacity to exist sensually and meaningfully, is the powerful message of “Barbara Forever,” Brydie O’Connor’s pulsating documentary ode to the ceaseless drive of trailblazing lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer (“Nitrate Kisses”). Get ready to potentially feel joyful and self-analytical afterward — Hammer packed a lot of expression into her out years, all the way to her death from ovarian cancer in 2019.

Avoiding the traps of stuffy academic assessment or testimonial-studded tribute, O’Connor goes the immersive route, letting Hammer’s own voice accompany a deftly edited archival journey that moves easily across personal reflection and societal impact. The emotions of that approach are set up by a vérité opening, in which we see Hammer and her partner of decades, Florrie Burke, prepare to send her papers to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Hammer turned her experiences into a legacy of never-before-tapped perspective, from the moment she was a 30-year-old divorcee and another woman’s touch changed (and started) everything. She not only needed to live as a lesbian, but pick up a camera and convey its carnal, intellectual, affirming power. The movies themselves, from her early ’70s ecstatically sex-filled shorts (“Dyketactics”) to inquisitive relationship documents (“Double Strength”) and spatially expansive mind-body explorations (“Optic Nerve”), reveal a timeline of tactility as she gets older and considers her visibility as a lesbian artist in a cultural hierarchy all too dismissive of personal histories such as hers.

Longer, award-winning works such as 1992’s “Nitrate Kisses” and 1995’s “Tender Fictions” — both screened at Sundance — eventually raised her profile, giving her a sense that she’d arrived. But that didn’t change her internal chemistry as a queer pioneer driven to reveal the new and put that energy onscreen. One memorable scene shows the wiry, personable Hammer introducing a classroom of grade-schoolers to experimental film. Everyone’s enthusiasm feels revelatory: We’re watching kids embrace their sense of play and a gray-haired woman who understood the need to keep that exuberance going like a well-tended flame.

When illness came for her, it in no way creatively hampered Hammer. If anything, we’re even more ready to see what she had in mind in her final years of art-making (besides capturing from her hospital bed the beauty of light shining through a chemo drip bag). An out-of-context clip O’Connor deploys at the very beginning — Hammer filming her 70-something self, nude against a dark backdrop — is revealed as being taken at a moment when she was feeling her way through cancer. It simply stuns.

There’s a strange irony to this age of relentless self-filming: It’s birthed a devaluing of openness. The wonderful “Barbara Forever” is a testament to the true boldness of putting one’s self out there, noting what it feels like and not keeping it to yourself. There’s no other way to create an artistic legacy.