Inhalt

Since the mid-seventies, experimental film and video maker Barbara Hammer has explored in radically innovative ways issues such as lesbian sexuality, autobiography, women’s
spirituality and collectivity. „I have become interested in history since I’ve become an older lesbian woman artist“, says Hammer, „I have the personal fear that my work could be lost because I had such a hard time finding others“.
The Female Closet takes an historical look at the world of „high art“ through the lives and work of three women artists: turn-of-the-century photographer Alice Austen; Hanna Höch, most famous for her Dada photomontages; and New York-based Nicole Eisenman, wunderkind of the contemporary
lesbian chic art scene. Each of these stories poses
fundamental questions about the (re)construction of history, class, sexuality identity, and identity politics. The film is an accomplished scissors-and-paste job, using talking heads, home movies, archival photographs and so on.