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“Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever
Barbara Forever, courtesy of Sundance Institute. “It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more.
It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor—who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke for her acclaimed 2022 short Love, Barbara—in her Sundance-debuting feature Barbara Forever. Fusing Hammer’s poetic words and striking images with her own experimental editing approach, O’Connor takes us on a riveting ride through one woman’s boldly adventurous life and the larger frame of queer history, from the lesbian and gay rights movement of the ’70s through to today’s more inclusive and expanded awakening. Ultimately, Barbara Forever is a heartfelt portrait of an individual who wasn’t afraid to embrace life on her own terms, holding lessons for humans of every profession and persuasion.
A few days before the film’s January 24th Park City premiere, Filmmaker caught up with O’Connor, an award-winning artist in her own right whose “work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space.”
Filmmaker: Could you talk a bit about the genesis of this film? Had you always planned on eventually following up your 2022 award-winning short Love, Barbara with a feature?
O’Connor: I began working on Barbara Forever shortly after I released Love, Barbara in early 2022, which focused on Barbara Hammer’s legacy through the lens of her love story with her partner of over 30 years, Florrie Burke, who narrates the film.
While making the short, I discovered a trove of archival audio recordings of Barbara speaking candidly about her life. I was especially drawn to her unfiltered reflections on artistic ambitions, romantic and sexual desires, life with Florrie, and how she continued creating while living with cancer for nearly 13 years. I was incredibly excited about the idea of Barbara Hammer narrating the film in her own words, interwoven with the visual language of her published films and private archival tapes as the core idea for Barbara Forever.
Filmmaker: Since Barbara’s archive is extensive—perhaps overwhelming—how did you decide what to include and what to leave out? What was that editing process like?
O’Connor: Barbara’s archive is absolutely immense, and at times it felt almost alive—unruly and deeply intimate. From the beginning I knew that the film couldn’t be comprehensive in the traditional sense, and instead, the challenge was to be deeply intentional. Our driving question throughout the edit was not about what should be included, but what certain material reveals about why Barbara so constantly turned her camera on how she lived, worked and loved.
With this guiding principle, the editing process became one of distillation. I worked closely with my editor Matt Hixon to identify materials that felt essential to Barbara’s emotional and artistic DNA—imagery and moments that reveal her humor, defiance, curiosity, and her radical sense of self-invention. In the end, there were so many remarkable moments in the archive that could not be included in the film, which remain in her kaleidoscopic ephemera and archival collections.
Filmmaker: Your approach to the material really hews close to Barbara’s own adventurous spirit and nonlinearity. (You even begin with her “birth” as a lesbian and save any mention of her childhood until an hour in.) Did you feel added pressure to “channel” Barbara, or did this just come naturally? Did working on the doc change your own experimental style in any way?
O’Connor: Our team approached the structure of the film through a “queered chronology,” in the sense that we weren’t interested in a linear ladder from birth to death, but in organizing the film around moments of awakening, rupture, desire and self-definition. Beginning with Barbara’s “birth” as a lesbian felt true to how she understood herself, and to how she framed her own life and work. Starting there allowed the film to immediately situate viewers inside Barbara’s own worldview.
I wouldn’t say I felt pressure to channel Barbara’s experimental sensibilities so much as a responsibility to make a documentary about Barbara Hammer that is inherently queer in both content and form. Barbara’s work is rooted in experimentation, play and refusal—and honoring that meant trusting nonlinearity as an organizing principle rather than a stylistic device. In this way our approach was guided less by imitation, and more by letting the structure itself reflect the values Barbara lived by and imbued in her films.
Filmmaker: Another aspect of Barbara’s pioneering radicalism was her insistence on making lesbian sex explicit, which was radical to straight folks, though likely also to assimilationist gays and lesbians who might prefer to keep the focus on “who we love not how we lust.” Do you have any thoughts on Barbara’s legacy when it comes to portraying sexual desire on screen?
O’Connor: Barbara understood sexual desire as something that was central to her identity as a lesbian, and insisted on showing lesbian sex—and a woman’s body—as lived, felt and embodied. That insistence was radical not because it was shocking, but because it refused shame and erasure.
For Barbara, desire was a form of knowledge. By filming lesbian sex explicitly she was reclaiming a woman’s body as a site of authorship and pleasure—particularly a lesbian body that had been historically rendered invisible. Barbara wasn’t interested in separating “who we love” from “how we lust” because for her those were inseparable.
In this regard, Barbara Hammer’s legacy is that her work expanded what lesbian representation could look like on screen, in both content and form. She created space to share her desires as joyful, messy, political, and most of all, self-defined. In doing so, her work offers future generations permission to explore our own desires with curiosity and play, without needing to make queerness and sex palatable.
Filmmaker: Now that Barbara Forever is out in the world, what sort of impact do you hope the film will have?
O’Connor: I hope Barbara Forever inspires viewers to go out into the world and do exactly what they want to do with their life, artistic or otherwise. I also hope our film inspires audiences to further seek out Barbara Hammer’s canon of work and discover points of relation, instances where Barbara’s questions, risk-taking and desires may echo their own.
